Like many people, my childhood Pokémon card binder has been in my parents' garage for more than a decade—maybe two!—gathering dust. I didn’t actually know where it was until helping my parents prepare for a move this summer, sorting through bins and buckets that hadn't been considered for years. We mostly threw things away, out of the garage and into a rented dumpster: the Valentine's Day cards from my middle school class, my sisters' report cards, and other little bits and bobs. When my mom pulled the binder out of the mess, we all stopped to look through it. It was more than full, with multiple cards in each slot. Its front cover hung on by threads of cardboard, seemingly decayed from all the years in storage.
Admittedly, my first thought was value: How much is this worth? We looked up a few cards but moved on quickly to the task at hand of throwing out stuff.
I can't remember the last time I touched this binder. There was no apparent rhyme or reason to the way I put my cards in, except that I did separate the trainer and energy cards. The Pokémon cards, though, are in no particular order. Most of the sleeve slots have one, two, three or even more cards stuffed in behind them. Somehow, most of them are in fairly good condition, despite my clearly chaotic collecting style. (A few are, unfortunately, stuck together.) There are a bunch of holographic cards—even a Charizard!
I went to a card show, as research for a different story, and asked a kid vending: Are these worth anything? He said some were. We moved all the holographic cards to the front of the binder. Eventually, my husband and I brought them to a card shop. The card shop is tucked away in a mostly abandoned mall. Living in this town for nearly three years, I had no idea it existed. It was the only store in the mall with any activity at all: people gathered inside to play Pokémon.
We asked the man behind the counter to take a look at the holographic cards. He said he'd buy them all for 65% of their value. I agreed. I pulled a couple aside (including the Charizard) while he priced them out. I used the money to buy a few cards for my new collection, Pokémon with food. He gave me store credit for the rest. I kind of regret it. It all happened so fast that I just let it happen, even though I wasn't sure about anything—the deal I was getting, or if I wanted to sell all of them. It's not this guy's fault! It's a me problem that I simply went along with it all.
In the weeks and months that have passed since then, I've become attached to these cards in a way I didn't expect. I got a new binder for my cards, and have spent many nights now sorting and reorganizing them with my partner. We look at the cards and inspect their art, sort them by type, and lay them out in the binder. Multiples are all next to each other, of course. I have a full page of Charmanders. I pulled out Pokémon that have food in their art, and my partner pulls any Pokémon that look like they have anxiety. Sometimes I have a new idea on how to organize them, so I take out all the cards and start again. We started organizing some of our favorite Pokémon into pages in which we go by evolutions, so Charmander, Charmeleon, then Charizard. One of the cards I sold was an original holographic Venusaur, so now that evolution line is incomplete. (I never had a Blastoise, but I do still have a page full of Squirtles and Wartortles.)
It's both the best and worst time to get into Pokémon cards. Interest is at an all-time high, buoyed by a pandemic boost and several popular sets, so there are lots of people willing to talk Pokémon with you. I've never met so many people who want to look at my cardboard collection. It feels exciting to be involved, and to meet other people who love Pokémon in the same way. There's so much art and joy in the hobby; my favorite part, so far, is looking through someone's binder and listening to them tell the stories about how they've acquired these cards. But all that interest means there's also the bad side: It's nearly impossible to buy anything card-related at retail price. The moment cards are stocked on the shelves, they're gobbled up by scalpers. There are whole Instagram channels dedicated to the violence of certain card restocks. There are people fighting at Pokémon vending machines, stalking store employees, and robbing stores and vendors at gunpoint. It's easy to get caught up in the value of the cards, even as a casual collector, but the things people will do to acquire cards is actually nuts.
I don’t feel the same frenzy as some others about trading or selling cards; I’d rather do so slowly and with intention. (Though, like I said, it's easy to get caught up in the value part, and I'm not immune to that.) I've been to a couple more card shows since, and they're a blast: wandering around the aisles, searching through displays and binders of cards for something that fits my collection. At my first show as a collector, I found a vendor with a whole bunch of Yuka Morii cards. (Yuka Morii is the card art designer who makes Pokémon out of clay and photographs them. They're brilliant, and always a joy to find.) The vendor, a young adult, looked through my binder for things that he'd like to buy, and found one: an EX Power Keepers Pichu card. He collects Pokémon cards that are stamped, like this one. He pulled out another stamped card, a special Mewtwo that was given out with movie tickets to Pokémon: The First Movie. I traded both for a whole bunch of Yuka Morii cards, and he let me pick out several more for free. He had stickers of the Yuka Morri designs, too.
At that same show, I found another card—Fuecoco in the supermarket, an absolutely adorable full art card from the Paldea Evolved set—at another vendor's setup. At $60, the Fuecoco card was priced much higher than I'd ever pay, but the seller worked with me to go through my cards and get me to a roughly $60 trade. I have a lot of vintage cards, and most are worth just a few dollars. It took a bit to get us there, but we did it, and I left with a card I adore.
On the way out, a child approached to ask if I was trading Pokémon cards. We swapped binders in the event space's lobby. He told me his dad (my age!) had binders of now vintage Pokémon cards as a kid, but they got stolen. I picked out Iono's Kilowattrel, from the Journey Together set. He took a Team Rocket's Charmander and a Wartortle.
For everything that is bad about this hobby—scalpers, expense, and the fact that opening packs is literally gambling—I've found so much to love. I'm reconnecting with art I haven't seen in decades, I'm meeting people I otherwise would have never known, and I'm pushing myself outside my boundaries to do that. It's kind of wild to me that these (sometimes) shiny pieces of cardboard can have that sort of impact on my life.
I'll leave you with one last story: My husband and I used our three hour drive home after a trip to visit local trading card game stores on the way. We mostly browsed and talked to the shop staff, but on our last stop, we brought our cards in with us. I'd found a couple that fit my food collection (Melody from Crown Zenith making breakfast, and Nacl, who is literally rock salt, from Paldea Evolved.) I made a couple trades for them, and my husband pulled out his binder of Magic: The Gathering cards to show the woman who was helping us. The first card he showed her was one she needed for a deck she intended to use that night. It was the only card she was missing. He added it to our trade (he has a few) and picked up a Slowpoke card.
Again, we're literally trading cardboard, but I can't explain how special it felt to give this woman something she needed.
