For over a year, buying booster packs of Pokémon cards on the official Pokémon Center website has required either the most extraordinary luck, or a bot. When new stock is added to the site, it very quickly collapses under the weight of incoming traffic, leading to error messages or queues that never resolve. Any who do manage to get in before the site goes down are limited by strict purchase restrictions, except of course for those running the bots that are able to scoop up the stock in milliseconds. So was today’s peculiar decision to bundle the enormously popular Surging Sparks booster boxes with the never-wanted and very bulky Pokémon Academy boxes a deliberate troll of the scalpers by The Pokémon Company?
Surging Sparks is the set that’s generally considered to be the beginning of the current frenzy that’s seen Pokémon cards become almost impossible to buy for the last 15 months, where rocketing resale prices have led to scalping ruining the hobby for so many, and indeed strings of robberies at many specialist retailers around the world. Its restock today on the U.S. Pokémon Center website was therefore something of a surprise—occurring without promotion and of course inevitably selling out before most were aware it was even happening. Except, rather than these 36-pack containers appearing for the usual price of around $160, today’s booster boxes were all bundled with the latest edition of the Battle Academy, a hefty $20 box that’s designed to introduce new players to the table-top card game, and all for the undiscounted price of $180.
If you’re already familiar with the Pokémon TCG, you’ve likely already snorted a laugh at this. For everyone else, it’s important to know that the Battle Academy is to Pokémon cards what the Fisher Price telephone is to the iPhone. It contains a chunky playing board, push-out cardboard counters, and three 60-card decks with special, numbered cards that don’t feature the standard Pokémon card back designs, nor even a single holo among them. Even better, the Battle Academy hasn’t been updated in so many years that they still sport the late 2010’s Pokémon V cards. They are, in the scheme of collecting, worthless.
This has to be a troll, right? While it won’t have cost any more in shipping (the Pokémon Center is unreasonably good on this, waiving shipping costs for purchases over $20), it’s going to be such an epic pain in the ass for the scalpers, as their every shipment arrives with this enormous extra box of stuff they don’t want or need, and most of all, cannot resell. It’s an extra $20 too, which is just enjoyably inconvenient.
You could argue that this is also screwing over legitimate customers, and that’s sadly true. However, for independent card stores being repeatedly let down by The Pokémon Company’s official retail suppliers (according to multiple store owners I’ve spoken to in the UK since stock shortages began, the company is allegedly prioritizing larger retail chains over them) it’s a fantastic deal, given they can also sell the Battle Academy boxes to their younger customers.
It’d be far better to see the Pokémon Center website actually spending the money to build an infrastructure that can cope when it stocks new TCG cards, but in the meantime, if this really was a way to just irritate scalpers, it’s hard not to give over a little kudos.