Jalen Manley walked into The Game Haven in Pikesville last weekend hoping to buy Pokémon cards.
It’s been hard to find a wide variety at bigger stores like Target and even GameStop, where shelves have been empty and online inventory has been sold out for months. So many collectors are turning to local card and game shops to purchase booster packs of the uber-popular collectibles — or single, specific cards, one at a time.
For local card stores, the surge in demand has been a mixed bag. People are coming in, but customers aren’t always leaving happy.
Manley got lucky and walked out with more than just a single card. He got to participate in a prerelease tournament at Game Haven for a new set of Pokémon cards that debuted Friday.
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The event tickets sold out online within two days. But when Manley walked in with his siblings on Sunday, enough slots had opened up for them to participate.
“To hear, ‘Oh we have some slots,’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have a chance.’ Play a little bit, get some packs early, I definitely enjoyed that,” Manley said.
Seated in the back of the brightly lit store at a large gaming table, Manley ripped open new Pokémon card packs and began strategizing, sizing up his Pokémon for battle.
Gotta catch ‘em all!
Pokémon was born in Japan in early 1996 and spread across the globe. It’s grown into a mega franchise of video games, manga, anime, trading cards, collectibles, mobile apps, home decor and much, much more.
Its popularity has plateaued at times, but never truly diminished. But if Pokémon has been consistently huge for more than 20 years, why is the market for trading cards so active right now?
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It’s likely a combination of trends, collectors and Game Haven employees said. Two sets of cards in a row, called “Surging Sparks” and “Prismatic Evolutions,” featured the popular Pokémon Pikachu and Eevee characters, respectively, driving demand.
Collectors are also willing to pay a premium for rare cards, both old and new, and though the Pokémon Company International prints billions of cards annually, it hasn’t kept pace with demand. Because of how the company distributes cards, even customers in the North Carolina town where cards are printed struggle to find them in stores.
Experts told The Athletic that people have discovered a “flipability” in Pokémon cards, meaning new products can be bought cheap and resold at a high markup. The children who grew up playing Pokémon in the ’90s and early 2000s are now adults, willing to spend on nostalgic purchases. First edition booster packs from the ’90s have sold for more than $3,600 in the past two months online.
Asked for comment, Jenna Schwartz, a spokesperson working with The Pokémon Company, referred to a statement released in late March. The company said it was “actively working to print more” products that fans were having difficulty finding on store shelves, and referenced “very high demand” affecting availability.
To try to prevent people from buying large quantities of products to resell at a markup, the official Pokémon Center retail website has set up online queues for when new products become available. GameStop recently announced that new Pokémon trading card products will have a limit of one per customer. Multiple Target stores in the area have begun storing new Pokémon products behind the customer service desk and enforcing purchase limits.
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Local shops like Game Haven are at the mercy of their product distributors, store manager Jake Chupashko said.
“They only have so much, and we actually get more than some places, and like, it’s not nearly enough to meet the demand,” he said.
Managing a store that sells Pokémon has become harder because of the current demand, Chupashko said. It can be difficult to manage people’s expectations, he said, especially those who are new to the hobby or trying to profit off collecting.
The store has changed how it processes preorders, requiring customers to send emails and request specific products rather than click a button in their online shop. All the extra work managing a high-demand product puts “a strain on everything else,” Chupashko said.
“Every time you create a barrier for someone to buy something, they’re less likely to buy and it’s less enjoyable of an experience,” he said.
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Other local card shops have put in similar measures. Tournament City Games in Frederick has placed limits on the number of new Pokémon cards customers can purchase, as has Charm City Collectibles in Hanover.
Regular customers, though — the collectors and Pokémon fans who are in it for the long haul — have been mostly understanding, Chupashko said.
It all goes back to the culture he’s tried to cultivate at Game Haven: “A happy third space,” referring to the concept of a place that isn’t home or work where people gather to spend time. There are snacks and coffee for sale, too.
“There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of time here and they feel comfortable here,” he said. “And everyone buys into it.”
The store easily has “hundreds” of customers who come in at least once a month, Chupashko said, whether it’s to buy something, trade, play in a tournament or find a casual game with others.
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The store has game playing space for about 70 people, and it fills up multiple times per week. Sometimes for Pokémon, sometimes for Magic: The Gathering, sometimes for other games.
On one side, when you walk into the store, there are dozens of board games; on the other, hundreds, if not thousands, of trading cards in display cases and boxes behind the counter.
Most of Game Haven’s customers are people in their 20s or 30s, Chupashko said, but there are also families, people in their 50s or 60s still collecting and, of course, kids getting into it for the first time. The community of regular customers will “ride out the storm” of high Pokémon demand and still be around a year from now, Chupashko said.
“We have a really good community, and everybody does celebrate everyone’s wins and feel everyone else’s losses,” he said.
That was on clear display during the prerelease tournament. Part of the event involves everyone opening new packs of cards. Every few minutes, as someone pulled a “hit” out of their pack and showed it off, people celebrated.
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Those celebrations included Manley, who pulled his “chase” card out of a pack — the top card from the set he had wanted.
It was a rare version of a Typhlosion card, a Pokémon from the series’ second generation of creatures. It’s the final form of Cyndaquil, a fire-type “first partner Pokémon” that a person playing a Pokémon video game could choose to start their adventure.
“It was almost a magical moment,” Manley said after the event. “This was like, what I went there for. It’s like, ‘Whatever else happens today, I’m good.’”
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