>>57913196It's a culmination of things, rather than a singular trigger.
INVOOSTING in collectables becoming mainstream has been ramping up since Covid, and all the instability for the last five years has people lookig for multiple income streams so that they can escape the rat race. This is also on the back of years of news of record breaking card sales between 2018-2022 in particuar, so people started digging into their old collections to see if they had anything valuable.
Open social media is more prominent, so viral videos are much easier to spread than ever before. If you show a tangential interest in Pokémon, you're going to get flooded with videos of people pulling or selling cards worth hundreds, or thousands. Again, solidifying Pokémon as a way to make money.
Content creators capitalise on this, and to legitimise their platforms and generate them some additional income, try to sell people a product, their 'knowledge' about Pokemon as a stock to invest in to make lots of money.
Pokémon's return to popularity since the end of SM and into SwSh, and them really upping on their own marketing across the board with huge events and collabs, which again, go viral on social media.
PTCGP being a gateway drug for new and returning fans to convert from digital to physical.
This all came to ahead with Surging Sparks having Pikachu as the mascot, and then FOMO surrounding 151, resulting in people treating it like toilet paper during Covid, only more valuable.
Since then, it's been like an ouroboros feeding its own hype and artificial scarcity where people are getting FOMO, buying out as much as they can, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps, and then buying out as much as they can when they get the chance. The scarcity is making people more desperate.
Scalpers exploit this, but they're not the main problem.
