Pokemon TCG players say card collecting fuels gambling habits

Pokemon TCG players are sharing “hot takes,” as one player argued that card collecting incites gambling habits.

For more than two decades, Pokemon players around the globe have purchased trading cards to fill out their TCG collections.

The card game isn’t getting any less popular, either. Last year, The Pokemon Company announced that it had produced over 52 billion cards as of March 2023. Nearly 10 billion of those cards were manufactured between April 2022 and March 2023.

Scalping woes, issues of theft, and so on suggest the business around Pokemon TCG is as lucrative as ever. However, fans have shared some hot takes that may raise some interesting questions.

Pokemon TCG fans call out bad card-collecting habits

In a post on the Pokemon TCG’s subreddit, one fan asked the community to share their “hot takes” about the popular card game. The user kicked off the conversation by stating their belief that “the Rayquaza Vmax Alt Art from ES is massively overrated and frankly an ugly card.”

It didn’t take long for other Pokemon TCG veterans to chime in with their own arguably controversial opinions. Notably, gambling quickly became a topic of discussion. One Redditor wrote that users on the Whatnot app take advantage of kids and, in so doing, teach them “unhealthy gambling habits.”

The upvotes on the reply suggest many people agree with this sentiment. Another user went as far as to say, “This community in general has a problem with glorifying gambling addiction.” Others couldn’t agree more, especially since the hobby in general is “built on gambling.”

The Pokemon Company

Of course, gambling isn’t the only hot take that Pokemon TCG fans have when it comes to card collecting. Further in the thread, a different Redditor had choice words for The Pokemon Company‘s excessive printing. “Pokemon is printing sets that are too big, too often, and the impossibility [of keeping] up is taking the fun out of collecting.”

Several other hot takes in the thread have also received lots of attention. One person joined the chorus with, “packs are severely overpriced for the hit rates. no one has ever pulled a reverse holo and gone ‘f**k yeah.'”

Someone with thoughts about hoarding wrote, “Your hoarded ‘collection’ of English products from the past three years will not yield big profits in the future.”

For some, many of these opinions may not feel like unwelcome hot takes at all.