What Kind Of Maniac Would Sell Their Graded Pokemon Cards To GameStop? (2024)

GameStop’s future is perpetually uncertain. I didn’t expect the once-ubiquitous video game retailer to survive the pandemic, seemingly dragged along by meme stock speculation and a rotating door of CEOs with ever-increasingly bad ideas. These days, the game plan for maintaining cultural relevance revolves around making the most ill-advised, hair-brained, headline-grabbing business decisions possible. Exhibit A: a gambit to break into the graded collectible market, starting with Pokemon cards.

Pokebeach first picked up on this story, which originated in an internal message on GameStop’s subreddit. According to the message, the program rolled out to 258 stores this week, and GameStop employees are already receiving training on how to accept PSA graded trading cards. Evidently, GameStop intends to expand into the graded collectible market in various categories, but is just starting out with Pokemon cards.

As absurd as the idea of a big box retailer trading in Pokemon slabs sounds, this is perfectly on-brand for GameStop. The flagging company has been chasing one get-rich-quick scheme to the next for years, from Funko Pops and credit cards to NFTs of 9/11 victims. Some short-sighted GameStop executive heard a podcast about how much the value of graded Pokemon cards has been exploding since the pandemic, and decided it was about time ‘ol GameStop got a taste.

But while it’s a very Gamestop Thing To Do, it’s also stupendously stupid. For one thing, the culture of the secondary trading card market is almost as volatile and open to manipulation as the actual stock market, and GameStop is opening itself up a variety of schemes that will be incredibly easy for bad actors to pull off, facilitated by minimum-wage workers who may or may not have any experience or expertise in buying and selling graded cards.

Even if GameStop does miraculously figure out how to authenticate the cards it buys and react to a market that fluctuates minute by minute, the biggest challenge is going to be convincing anyone with half a brain to sell their cards to GameStop in the first place.

I’m trying hard to imagine who the target customer is here, and I just can’t find the answer. There’s no one out there that has PSA-graded cards by accident. You don’t pick them up in a yard sale like old video games, you don’t find them randomly stuffed between your couch cushions, and if you have them, you absolutely know exactly what they’re worth. Getting cards graded is a whole separate, much more involved hobby than simply collecting cards, and the people that do it are engaged with the secondary market. They know how to buy and sell their cards to other collectors and they know the market value of their slabs. Under no circ*mstances would someone be willing to trade their cards to GameStop for pennies on the dollar - even with a ten percent bonus in store credit.

I’m making the obvious joke about the way GameStop values trade-ins, but it’s obvious for a reason. The store has spent decades building a reputation for hoodwinking customers and providing extremely poor values for trades. Everyone I know has walked into a GameStop with a pile of games they bought for $60 a pop, and walked out with $11 in store credit. Who is this person that’s going to collect Pokemon cards, send the valuable ones off to PSA, wait weeks to get them back, then turn around and flip them to GameStop for a mere fraction of what they could get by selling them to another collector or an actual game store? Thieves aren’t going to be able to boost 40 copies of a PSA 10 Shiny Charizard from Walmart and flip them at GameStop the way they do with Madden every year, so I ask again, who exactly is going to be supporting GameStop in this?

The best-case scenario for GameStop here is the worst-case for the trading card community. In a world where GameStop is somehow able to compete in the graded TCG market, local game stores - and the communities that support them - will likely collapse. If you love your LGS and everything they provide to players - the space, the expertise, the customer service - you’d be a fool to take any of your business to GameStop. That’s just one more in the long list of reasons this is a horrible, doomed idea.