# Would it be worth my time to buy and sell Pokemon cards?



## HoodieWolf (Aug 20, 2015)

I've seen a lot of people recently talking about how much profit can be made in selling cards from loads of different games like MtG, Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon. I've always liked the idea of getting and selling the rarer Pokemon cards to earn some money. Is there anyone out there who has already done this? If so please give me some advice about how I should go about doing this.


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## PrincessParrot (Aug 20, 2015)

I don't know much about the sales of cards from MtG or Yu-Gi-Oh, but for pokemon, probably the best way to turn a profit is to buy a factory sealed boosted box and don't open it for a couple years and then resell it once the set is out of print. The booster boxes go for 100 dollars and if you're lucky, you may pull 6-7 ultra rares out of them, which if you're collecting is awesome and if you're just looking for deck building cards, you can sell an extras or cards you don't need. Thing is, the going rate for most full art ultra rares is about $10-20 usd so you would turn a profit if you got a good number of ultra rare full arts but it's still based on your luck of pulling the right cards. So it's safer to go with the sealed booster box, so as long as pokemon stays popular and people are looking to collect, they'll pay good money for one of those.


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## Kinare (Aug 20, 2015)

You could buy all of my Pokemanz. :L Sell back for profit though? Probably not, cuz I'm greedy and would want what they're worth.

But yeah, in all seriousness, you could do what that parrot there said and get some booster boxes to hold for a while, but tbh unless it's a popular series with really good cards, you might barely make back what you paid for them, even after a couple years, and to turn a really nice profit you would have to buy a fuckton of them. (I speak only for Pokemon though, none of the others.) You'd also have to be intelligent about the series you decided to stock up on by seeing what the rarest cards go for and how many there are and how popular they are in comparison to others. Also sometimes really good are the collector tins and the promo boxes. Sealed collector tins/promo boxes can go for quite a bit if they're old and for a popular Poke, but they also require you to use a bit o' intelligence because again, some of them you might barely make your money back on. Again, you'll likely need to buy a fuckton of even the best ones to turn a nice profit.

Really the only sure fire way to get much money out of it from what I can tell is to have a shop where you can rip little kids off by offering them trash for their good cards, then reselling them for their actual value, and if it's a legit shop you can buy wholesale so you'd get new cards cheaper. I bought about 4 boxes of the Unseen Forces set a few years back trying to get my paws on a shiny Suicune since no one in the world seemed to have an English or Japanese one for a fair price, then tried to force myself to sell off the ones I didn't want and I did make a decent amount off some of them, but I dare say I barely made my money back since I ended up keeping the most valuable one, the shiny Suicune. Even if I had sold him, I wouldn't have made much more on him at the time, but he's probably worth quite a bit now since UF boxes are more expensive and he was rare as heck even back then. At one point I even had store status with eBay so there was a discount on listings and I got a handy uploader tool to use, which made it a lot easier, but once the best cards I didn't want to keep sold it stopped being worth it to me.

There is obvious cash if you can get your paws on any limited exclusives that either have very limited prints or are only available at certain events for a limited amount of time, but easier said than done if you don't know the right people or live somewhere that things like that are hard to access. ComicCon exclusives come to mind as a good example, even if they're not super limited, because not everyone can go to CC but want the some of the collectibles.

If I was going to get back in the business and had the money to invest into it, I would do a combo of these: buy some good booster boxes to hold (both new and old), buy some collector's tins/promo boxes to hold (again, both new and old), plus open a few booster boxes and hold the most valuable cards for a while, but sell off any of the other cards ASAP because those don't ever go up much in value (sometimes go down). I might also consider buying up some of the more valuable cards out there if I can find great prices on them from current sellers. Once I move to my own place I'm considering trying to get back into this, but if I did it now my people would think I was blowing all my cash on stuff I wanted to keep and get on my case about it all the time.


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