If I informed you there was a Pokémon card going for $50, you’d marvel why I used to be bothering you. In a world the place such issues repeatedly change palms 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 lots, 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 full actually is one. However $50?! What’s the purpose of getting access to an internationally well-known, widely-read, top-tier gaming web site when all of the employees are on vacation if you happen to can’t use it to complain about that?
The cardboard costs are—I hesitate to make use of the phrase “justified”—by at all times together with a Pokémon pin, too. The positioning’s tiny steel 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 whenever you’re paying $9.99 for a “Comfortable New 12 months” card, you’re actually paying for the Pikachu pin that pokes by the opening within the entrance.
However this newest $50 birthday card? It’s…it’s functionally an identical 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 an incredible 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″ anyplace, 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 worth 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.
We have now after all reached out the Pokémon to examine 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 under complaining what a gradual information day it should be, and the way all the things’s such a rip-off at the moment that we shouldn’t be shocked.
