Ten Billion Cards Weren't Enough

Ten billion. That's how many Pokémon cards The Pokémon Company printed last year. More cardboard than humans on Earth. And you still can't walk into a Target and buy a pack at retail.

The math doesn't work. The supply doesn't work. The logic doesn't work. Yet here we are: armed robbers hitting card shops in broad daylight in New York. A Florida man waving a battery-powered chainsaw while stealing $12,000 in cardboard. A fan hiding overnight inside a closed Best Buy just to grab a drop. This isn't collecting anymore. It's a crisis.

The President Speaks. Sort Of.

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa faced shareholders last month. He acknowledged the "issue" — corporate speak for a market so broken that violence has become a procurement strategy. His solution? The Pokémon Company is "taking various measures." Made-to-order sales. Agreements with marketplace operators. An account verification system tied to Japan's My Number national ID cards for online priority drawings.

Notice the geography. My Number Cards only exist in Japan. The verification system only applies there. The armed robbery happened in New York. The chainsaw theft happened in Florida. The Best Buy stakeout happened in Pasadena. Furukawa's remedies treat a global hemorrhage with a local bandage.

Made-to-Order Is a Promise, Not a Policy

Made-to-order sounds great. Print what people actually want. Eliminate the scarcity that scalpers exploit. But The Pokémon Company has deployed this selectively — special sets, anniversary products, the occasional premium collection. The core product line? Still allocated. Still scarce. Still designed to sell out in minutes.

That's the structural rot. Scarcity isn't a bug in the Pokémon TCG business model. It's the feature. Chase cards drive hype. Hype drives media coverage. Media coverage drives new players. New players buy sealed product hoping to hit the lottery. The lottery pays out for The Pokémon Company every single time.

Furukawa knows this. The Pokémon Company knows this. They printed 43 billion cards in the first 25 years. They've printed another 42 billion in just the last four. Production has quintupled. Demand has outpaced it anyway. That's not an accident. That's a strategy working exactly as intended.

Marketplace Agreements Mean Nothing Without Teeth

"Agreements with marketplace operators." Read: eBay, Mercari, Amazon, TCGPlayer. These platforms take a cut of every scalped sale. They have zero incentive to police volume sellers moving thousands of dollars in sealed product weekly. A handshake agreement changes nothing. Verified identity requirements for sellers? Maybe. Enforced purchase limits? Never — that would hurt revenue.

The only thing that forces marketplace compliance is legal pressure. Japan's new anti-scalping laws have teeth. The U.S. has nothing comparable. Until Congress treats ticket-scalping laws as applicable to trading cards — or until a state attorney general builds a case — the secondary market will remain a lawless profit machine.

The 30th Anniversary Will Break What's Left

September brings the 30th anniversary set. The hype cycle has already started. Influencers are speculating on pull rates. Scalpers are pre-selling boxes they don't have. Stores are preparing for lines, lotteries, and the inevitable thefts.

Ten billion cards last year. Fifteen billion might not be enough this year. The Pokémon Company could print money — literally, effectively — and still choose not to print enough cardboard to meet demand at retail. Because meeting demand kills the frenzy. The frenzy sells the brand.

Fans Are Hostages

A kid wanting a Charizard shouldn't need a chainsaw, a gun, or a sleeping bag outside a big-box store. They shouldn't need to pay $200 for a $45 box on eBay. They shouldn't need a Japanese national ID card to get a fair shot at a Japanese product sold globally.

Furukawa said The Pokémon Company "will continue to take measures." That's not a commitment. That's a holding pattern. The measures announced so far are incremental, geographically limited, and structurally incapable of solving the core problem: a company that profits from the very scarcity it claims to regret.

Print the cards. All of them. No allocation games. No artificial chase rates. No "limited quantity" marketing hooks. Flood the zone until the scalpers drown in unsellable inventory. Until then, every "measure" is just theater — and the next armed robbery is just a matter of when.