The World’s Most Costly Pikachu (Birthday) Card

If I instructed 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 commonly change arms 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 entire actually is one. However $50?! What’s the purpose of gaining access to an internationally well-known, widely-read, top-tier gaming website when all of the employees are on vacation should you 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 generally 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 if you’re paying $9.99 for a “Completely satisfied New 12 months” card, you’re actually paying for the Pikachu pin that pokes via the outlet within the entrance.

However this newest $50 birthday card? It’s…it’s functionally an identical to the one linked above, with the identical measurement pin, the identical Pokémon on the pin, the identical kind 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. However it appears the one balloons included are these drawn on the cardboard, and the one signal of gold is the colour of the lettering.

And irrespective of what number of instances I re-read the web page, it nonetheless doesn’t say, “Pack of 20″ wherever, irrespective 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.

We have now after all 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 possibly can remark beneath complaining what a gradual information day it should be, and the way all the pieces’s such a rip-off nowadays that we shouldn’t be shocked.