Have you ever thought about how wasteful the Pokemon trading card game actually is? Every booster pack includes a handful of common cards that are printed to the moon. Every pack includes an energy card and a code card. Some include vstar spacer cards. To get the good cards, the cards of value monetarily and in gameplay, you have to open pack after pack after pack. (I will point out now that yes you can buy singles and reduce waste, but those singles have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is people opening packs).
This endless opening of packs means you will in a short period of time buildup a massive collection of lower rarity cards. And when I say massive I mean massive. We’re talking 20, 40, 60 pounds of cardboard here. We’re talking multiple 4000 card bulk boxes if you’re dedicated to opening up booster packs. Now multiply this resource usage by say just 1,000,000 super Pokemon fans. And let’s just say they have only 20 pounds of bulk each, that means there is 20,000,000 pounds of paper product that is just sitting around unused.
You and I both know there are far more than 1,000,000 fans and collectors and that we’re talking about a much larger use of resources. Reportedly The Pokemon Company has had billions of cards printed in the last couple of years, increasing the total population of cards to something like 65 billion. 65 billion pieces of carboard covered in ink and foil, all made from wood product, and all taking up space.
That is not an efficient use of resources. 65 billion cards (which weigh approximately 100,000,000 kilograms)? With about 12 billion printed recently? What the heck are we doing here?
Just the foil of the pack itself is somewhat wasteful. We’re just adding another plastic product to the dump. And people open tons of packs, so we could be talking 200 foil packs headed to the dump near you from a single weekends pack opening binge.
Pokemon should ultimately follow a Magic the Gathering approach and Currency cards model. By that I mean there should be more cards, more types of cards, serialized cards, and one of ones. Doing those things would give Pokemon a focus on BOTH collectability and playability.
Currency cards uses a serialized and high number of variants model to sell collectible cards. Magic the Gathering focuses on creating booster packs focused on actual playability of the cards. Compare this with Pokemon booster packs where it genuinely feels like common cards are inserted solely as filler. They are not useful. Common cards in Magic the Gathering however are useful and you don’t get the sheer number of copies of those common cards that you do with Pokemon. Reworking Pokemon common cards to be more useful would prevent waste from being generated.
Serialized Pokemon cards would increase the collectability of Pokemon cards and make cards even more special than they otherwise would’ve been. Having multiple serialized cards for every set released while reducing commons would really get people going. And one of ones would be icing on the cake. One of one cards would really make Pokemon cards special.
More rarities, more serialized cards, useful commons, more card variants, and one of ones would all reduce waste and make the Pokemon trading card game more fun to play. It would also increase the collectability of Pokemon cards which is pretty important for The Pokemon Company.
This common card waste is just unsustainable. The Pokemon Company needs to rework how it does booster packs to catch up to the modern world. It’s not 1999 anymore and waste matters. Playability of the game matters, collectability matters. Implementing a Currency card and Magic the Gathering hybrid model would solve a lot of problems.
Screw commons.