Some recent observations from the ongoing TCG scarcity saga:
Last Thursday (May 8 ), my local Walmart finally had single card packs back in stock. I think that this is only the third time that they've had regular packs since
the start of 2025.
This store is in the suburbs of a major city in the US southeast, so it's not like our selection is limited because we're in the Alaskan wilderness or something.
The packs were all Stellar Crown. I'm not sure why that set seems to be the most plentiful. When I check online, Stellar Crown packs are usually the cheapest packs there, too.
Unfortunately for Walmart, they're the same price or significantly cheaper online.
The usual extras were stocked up, too—official decks, jumbo card boxes, resale bundles (of nothing but commons).
But they also had something unusual: boxes with mystery graded cards in them. As if they're really going to put some incredible card that's graded a solid 10 in a random box for 21 dollars. But hey, you can buy it and hope to get lucky, right?
Maybe this is common in other places and you guys are already familiar with these, but I'd never seen it before. It seems like it could be an indicator of where the market is going. Too many people just like graded cards too much.
On Friday (May 9), I saw an ad for cards at Walgreens. Google adsense has finally figured out what I actually like!
They're selling 4 recent packs, and an extra holographic card, for only 20 bucks? Sounds like a great deal!
They weren't in their spot on the shelf (even though they still
had a spot on the shelf reserved for those items), because I guess you can't trust people anymore...
But they
were up front, behind the registers.
Unfortunately, they don't match the picture online.
If you look closely, two of the four packs in every one of the cardboard-backed bundles has been replaced with the Trick-or-Trade packs. The ones with 3 cards in each of them, instead of the 10 that you're supposed to get from a normal pack.
AND they wanted 24 bucks for the things now. Booooooooo.
On Saturday (May 10), I was back in Walmart for something, and I swung by the card section again. I don't have a picture of what the whole long thing looked like before, but the trading card section (Pokémon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, tons of sports cards) used to take up the whole front wall between the two entrances to the checkout lanes on either side of the store. You can see part of it in my first picture.
It was all gone.
Now, the cards have been pushed off to a tiny section on one side.
This is all that's left. This happened in
two days.
The Stellar Crown packs, the theme decks, the boxes, most of the repackaged bundles—it had all been bought up. So Pokémon cards are clearly making money for the store. If something is selling a ton, you'd think that a store would want to sell
more of it.
Unless it
wasn't bought up, and the items were just taken off of the sales floor and moved to some storeroom.
But instead of leaning into this product which we know sells well, they don't even have the room for it now.
That's what really struck me—trying to figure out what this meant for the future of how cards are going to be sold.
Maybe they're just not going to be carried in most physical stores anymore. Maybe they'll all be online—where the seller can adjust the price instantly to match market trends (and charge you the most money possible), where they can hide how much they have in stock to manipulate scarcity (or slow down bulk-buying scalpers), and where people can't steal them.
Or maybe this behavior is just limited to one store, and it's an anomaly. I'd be interested to know if the rest of you have seen anything similar.
