A Tale of Two Promos

In short, early 2025 was so similar to the present that its noisiest voices could only speak in superlatives – the bull run was forever AND the crash was imminent.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that noise a year ago, I purchased two cards. This is a tale of two promos.

The Signal Nobody Was Talking About

By early 2025, Pokemon 151 had been around for a little over a year, which in the hobby is usually long enough for a set to either cause glutinous resellers to go broke or become something else entirely in the culture. 151 became something else entirely.

It had quickly become a nostalgia engine. Card shops kept it behind the counter if even they had any at all. YouTubers couldn't stop opening it. Whatnot streamers were still ripping it in March like it had just released, which is sort of like a movie still selling out theaters a year after its premiere. The demand wasn't normal.

But the thing I was paying attention to, and what I think a lot of collectors missed because they were focused on the set itself, was what 151 was doing to everything around it.

151 was reminding an entire generation of collectors, many of whom hadn't thought about Pokemon since they were nine, why they cared about Pokemon in the first place. And once that feeling got activated, it didn't stay localized to the 151 set. It spilled over into vintage holos, into Base Set and Jungle and Fossil, into the original WoTC promos that most of the market still hadn't fully realized the value of.

The Cards Nobody Priced Right

Here's what a lot of collectors still don't understand about promos: the way a card enters circulation permanently distorts how the market prices it, sometimes for decades.

The movie promos were handed out for free. You walked into a theater in 1999, you got a sealed pack with your ticket stub. Maybe you opened it, maybe you didn't. Maybe you kept it in a binder, maybe it went into a shoebox in your garage, maybe it went straight into the trash along with your popcorn bag. The point is, "free" became part of the card's identity. Perhaps that psychological residue is what kept these cards underpriced relative to their actual scarcity for over two decades.

The actual scarcity: there are 1,143 PSA 10 copies of the Pikachu #4 Black Star Promo in existence. There are 1,023 PSA 10 copies of the Mewtwo #3. No new packs to rip. No booster boxes sitting in a warehouse. No reprint run on the horizon, or ever (obviously). The supply is, for all practical purposes, sealed shut apart from a few sealed packs on eBay that are showing their age. And sealed supply in a market where demand is expanding is one of the most reliable conditions you can find in this hobby or any other.

In March 2025, you could buy into that sealed supply, in perfect gem mint condition, for $132. So I did. And two weeks later, I did it again with the Mewtwo for $275, which at the time felt like a lot but I trusted the signal and held on for the ride.

The Pocket-Sized Spark

Around the same time I was buying promos and staring at population reports, something else was happening that the hobby is only now beginning to fully appreciate. Pokemon TCG Pocket had launched in October 2024, and by March 2025 it had been live for about six months, long enough to stop being a novelty and start being a habit for millions of people.

TCGP brilliantly positioned itself by teaching new fans to care about specific cards. Not just in the abstract, but with specific cards, specific artwork, and specific rarity. It gamified the exact kind of desire that drives physical collecting, and it did it for an audience that may have never set foot in a card shop. Safe to say that a percentage of those people, and it doesn't take a lot to move a market, would eventually want the real thing.

And when they eventually went looking, it was for the characters they already know in the formats that feel the most legitimate. They look for Pikachu. They look for PSA 10. They look for 1999.

So in early 2025, I was watching three separate forces converge on the same set of cards: 151 was reactivating nostalgia demand across the entire original-era market, Pocket was creating a pipeline of new collectors with a built-in desire for physical cards, and the promos themselves were sitting at prices that reflected a psychological discount, not a supply reality.

Fast Forward One Year

It's now a year later.

More important than both cards having gone up so significantly is that they both did so for the same fundamental reasons: structural scarcity, cultural tailwinds, and a market that was expanding faster than most people realized. The thesis played out.

The Pikachu outperformed the Mewtwo (Pikachu is the franchise after all), and when new collectors enter the market like the millions that entered over the past year, a vast majority of them reach for the most recognizable characters first. Not the most powerful, not the coolest, not the one with the deepest lore. The one they know. And during periods of rapid audience expansion, that gravitational pull compounds in ways that benefit everything with Pikachu's name on it, but especially the scarce, original-era stuff that can't be reprinted.

Mewtwo is certainly beloved and iconic within the core community. But Pikachu is known by people who don't even collect cards, and that kind of universal recognition is a demand multiplier that shows up every time the hobby's tent gets bigger.

A Rising Tide Something Something

In a hobby where honesty feels like it's becoming rarer than a BGS Black Label, I must admit that Pokemon appears to clearly be in a mania phase. The 30th anniversary is driving speculation. Product shortages are creating artificial urgency. Mainstream attention is at levels we haven't seen since the pandemic. A lot of cards are up. A lot of people feel like geniuses. And that feeling, the warm certainty that you're good at this, is one of the most dangerous things a collector can carry into the next twelve months, because mania phases don't last. They never have. 2016 taught us that. 2021 taught us that. And soon we'll learn that lesson again, on a timeline that nobody can predict with precision but everybody should be preparing for.

When the correction comes, and it will come, the cards that hold their value will be the ones that went up for structural reasons: locked supply, durable character premium, cultural relevance that doesn't depend on a single set or a single anniversary. The cards that won't hold are the ones that went up because everything was going up.

These two promos went up for real reasons. I can trace every dollar of appreciation back to a signal that existed before I bought them. That doesn't mean they're immune to a pullback. Nothing is. But it does mean that the floor is higher than where I found them, and I can explain why without resorting to vibes or momentum or "the market is bullish."