The World’s Most Costly Pikachu (Birthday) Card

If I instructed you there was a Pokémon card going for $50, you’d surprise why I used to be bothering you. In a world the place such issues frequently change fingers within the lots of of 1000’s of {dollars}, such a determine is a shrug. However sorry, I ought to have been clearer: it’s a birthday card. A model new one. Mass-produced. It’s a $50 birthday card.

Now, The Pokémon Firm has been overcharging for greetings playing cards a lot, and I’ve beforehand triple-checked to see what number of playing cards you get in a $15 or $20 pack, solely to be flummoxed that the whole actually is one. However $50?! What’s the purpose of accessing an internationally well-known, widely-read, top-tier gaming web site when all of the employees are on vacation for those who can’t use it to complain about that?

The cardboard costs are—I hesitate to make use of the phrase “justified”—by all the time together with a Pokémon pin, too. The positioning’s tiny metallic badges additionally go for wallet-punching figures, hardly ever lower than ten {dollars}, and typically as a lot as $25. (That is one thing that bemuses me, given equally sized pins are routinely included in triple-pack blisters as “freebies”.) So once you’re paying $9.99 for a “Blissful New Yr” card, you’re actually paying for the Pikachu pin that pokes by way of the outlet within the entrance.

However this newest $50 birthday card? It’s…it’s functionally similar to the one linked above, with the identical dimension pin, the identical Pokémon on the pin, the identical form of cut-out design, and so far as I can inform, it’s not printed on paper-thin diamond.

At first I gallantly assumed the outline of “Pikachu Birthday Balloons Pokémon Pin & Greeting Card” meant it was going to additionally include a tremendous Pikachu balloon, and presumably a big bar of gold bullion. But it surely appears the one balloons included are these drawn on the cardboard, and the one signal of gold is the colour of the lettering.

And regardless of what number of occasions I re-read the web page, it nonetheless doesn’t say, “Pack of 20″ wherever, regardless of how a lot all of actuality says it ought to.

I understand the lure I fall in if I say, “How can they justify a fifty greenback value for a folded in half piece of cardboard,” given the cash I’ve spent on unfolded items of cardboard from the identical firm. However nonetheless.

Now we have in fact reached out the Pokémon to test this isn’t a matter of a typo, as a result of then wouldn’t everybody look foolish? Within the meantime, you’ll be able to remark beneath complaining what a sluggish information day it should be, and the way all the things’s such a rip-off at the present time that we shouldn’t be shocked.