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 usually change arms within the tons of of 1000’s of {dollars}, such a determine is a shrug. But 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 Company 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 entire actually is one. But $50?! What’s the purpose of gaining access to an internationally well-known, widely-read, top-tier gaming website when all of the workers are on vacation should you can’t use it to complain about that?
The card costs are—I hesitate to make use of the phrase “justified”—by all the time together with a Pokémon pin, too. The website’s tiny metallic badges additionally go for wallet-punching figures, hardly ever lower than ten {dollars}, and generally as a lot as $25. (This is one thing that bemuses me, given equally sized pins are routinely included in triple-pack blisters as “freebies”.) So while you’re paying $9.99 for a “Happy New Year” card, you’re actually paying for the Pikachu pin that pokes by way of the opening within the entrance.
But this newest $50 birthday card? It’s…it’s functionally similar to the one linked above, with the identical measurement 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 a tremendous Pikachu balloon, and probably a big bar of gold bullion. But 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 occasions I re-read the web page, it nonetheless doesn’t say, “Pack of 20″ anywhere, no matter how much all of reality says it should.
I realize the trap I fall in if I say, “How can they justify a fifty dollar price for a folded in half piece of cardboard,” given the money I’ve spent on unfolded pieces of cardboard from the same company. But still.
We have 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? In the meantime, you may remark beneath complaining what a gradual information day it should be, and the way every little thing’s such a rip-off these days that we shouldn’t be shocked.
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