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The fact people did this sort of thing by accident is why the cards he had were valuable. If everyone who had cards as a kid still had them no ones would be worth very much.

I had at least that many, first generation as well, including a bunch of Japanese shinies that my mum found in a shop somewhere and bought for me.

They all went into the loft at some point and later ended up in a bonfire along with my first edition Harry Potter book collection when my mum was doing a "clear out". Such is life.

Just to clarify: it was 42 _sets_ of cards, not just 42 cards.

Eh don't beat yourself up. Value for these sorts of things are extremely condition dependent, if you were playing with them then they would already not be in the condition to fetch these kinds of price.

Very likely not worth very much if that makes you feel any better. I recently did a quick check on my old Pokemon cards and there was nothing worthwhile

>infinite printing supply

Much like other collectibles all the most valuable cards are so long out of print that even if they were reprinted exactly as they were they would not receive the same valuation by the collectors because they are not the originals.

But the boom in old pokemon cards still drove demand for modern pokemon cards so much so that more pokemon cards have been printed post 2020 than the two decades before it despite the fact that “rare” cards you can obtain in new sets only go for hundreds to thousands at most and yet people still gamble on new pokemon card packs.

It's literally a card game. You can argue the utility and use case are stupid, or wildly less than the cost would suggest, but it's silly to say there is no utility, even if most collectors don't play the game.

It's kind of funny to see the Pokemon card vending machines at various grocery stores.

Today I went to a hardware store, and was humourously-surprised to find a Pokemon card vending machine there too.

This is an awful take as beanie babies were always predicted to be collectors items but failed to reach that status.

Pokemon cards, on the other hand, are veritable collectors items, like stamps or baseball cards.

Like baseball cards, their value comes from a combination of rarity and nostalgia.

Infinite theoretical printing supply. In reality, that specific really cool Charizard from my childhood stopped being printed decades ago, and natural wear and tear reduces the supply compared to 1999 (or whenever it was printed). Nostalgia kicks in, demand skyrockets. I don't know why Pokemon specifically did this, but it's far from the first trading card series to have this effect.

As for utility: it's still entertainment. remember that this is a TCG, so there technically is still a formatted game to play with these cards. Even if most effects in older cards have been long irrelevant in competitive formats, other TCG's can have card prices surge due to new strategies being discovered.

> without any utility or valid use case whatsoever.

Pokemon battles have some amount of entertainment value.

I mean sure, it's glorified cock fighting for kids, but that doesn't diminish the utility of the game as entertainment. It just makes it squishier.