Pokemon TCG: Prismatic Evolutions Elite Trainer Box topped on the TCGplayer Top 25 Sealed Products chart for January 2025 (see "January 2025"). The new chart offered some insight as to what trends are developing in the TCG market as it heads into 2025.

Well, Pokemon TCG is just bananas right now. The game started heating up sometime over the holiday season and has just absolutely exploded into the stratosphere, topping the TCGplayer Top 25 Sealed TCG Products Chart three months consecutively. What is even more impressive is that Pokemon TCG products make up over half of the products on the chart, which is something that hasn't happened in a while.

To put it into perspective as to how hot Pokemon TCG, Paul Wharshavsky, co-founder UVS Games (see "POW! Interactive"), recently shared some data on X about the January 2025 sales of Pokemon. According to his POW Interactive Holdings Corp, Pokemon Japan hit a record for sales with over 33 million packs sold in two weeks in January 2025. This is an absolutely insane number. If the U.S. sales are anything even remotely close to this figure, this means that Pokemon TCG is hotter than it has ever been!

But then, there's the proverbial other edge of the double-edged sword. How hot is too hot?

With sales numbers like that, The Pokemon Company International may need to invest in printer parts soon because those machines over at Millennium Print Group (see "U.S. Card Printer") and their counterparts in Japan are being worn to a nub in the efforts to meet demand. If history has taught us anything about the mass printing of Pokemon TCG and Magic: The Gathering sets, when a TCG explodes in demand like Pokemon TCG has in the last few months, there's almost always a period of consumer demand recoil that occurs down the road; once fans realize the sets printed during this time period have been printed to death.   

Now, with all that said, there is definitely something a little different about this time around the bust or boom TCG Tilt-a-Whirl. The recovery time intervals from the recoil off after the burst upward in demand seem to be getting shorter. The pandemic era, 2021-2022, saw the last major boom in print runs as TCG demand went skyrocketing. This next boom began at the end of 2024, which is only a little over two years later.

That is a much shorter time for consumer fatigue to wear off than had happened in similar booms that occurred 10-20 years ago in the TCG markets. In general, this would indicate that the TCG market is very strong right now and the upward trend for TCGs over the next several years, even with the occasional quick downturn, should prevail as consumers will regain their confidence in products faster (barring a secondary, external Black Swan event).