In one of GameStop’s many scrambles to stay alive beyond its memestock status, the stores began buying graded Pokémon TCG cards last year. Now the company has found a way to sell them back to you, but in a wildly bad mystery box deal.
GameStop’s attempt to behave like your local TCG store could only ever have been a bizarre corporate pastiche of the concept. When you go to your local independent card shop and trade in your pulls, they’ll usually give you a fair price that still leaves decent room for the store to resell them at a profit. When GameStop started doing it, it was without providing the staff with the necessary training and expertise, and naturally saw them paying woefully low prices, and of course without any of the individual stores having any independence over how it was carried out. The result of all that is now far more clear: for the last three months, GameStop has been selling graded cards back to customers in the form of mystery boxes, with the second phases of this initiative just launched. And wow, they’re not worth it.
Three months ago, the incredibly popular Pokémon YouTuber PokeRev opened the first wave of these mystery boxes, called GameStop Power Packs. At that point, these $60 boxes contained three “random” booster packs plus one PSA-graded card, at a grade of 8 or higher. The boxes showed an image of a Lost Origin Giratina V alt-art in a grade 10, which today would cost you over $1,600. That’d sure be nice to find. But just like the infamously terrible Walmart equivalent MJ Holding mystery boxes which do the same daft trick of putting extraordinarily rare packs on their boxes, that’s not what you’re likely to discover inside.
To be fair to GameStop, their presentation is at least a little nicer–Walmart’s mystery boxes are flimsy cardboard with the various items rattling loose inside. GameStop’s go the other way, with so much of the cost clearly going into the sturdy box, folding lid, and bespoke foam inset. But yeah, the chances of finding $60-worth of goodies inside seems incredibly slim.
This second wave of Power Packs has maintained the $60 price, but now only have two booster packs instead of three! Those packs, as revealed in PokeRev’s latest video on the boxes, seem to be two of Surging Sparks, 151, or Journey Together. That’s about $10 to $15 worth. The graded cards then seem to come in around $15 to $30, meaning most boxes will get you contents worth from half to two-thirds of what you paid. Which…sucks! $60 for $30 of cards.
There is, of course, the chance that the packs could contain a valuable card, but it’s not high, and no better than just buying the packs themselves for their actual price. The one positive I can find is that at least the PSA-graded cards aren’t just bulk. From watching plenty of those MJ Holding boxes getting opened that contain graded cards, those will very often feature a grade 7 generic card from a recent set, worth far, far less than it would have cost to grade it in the first place. Instead, what’s shown for GameStop’s seem to be at least some classic cards from the early 00s, both Japanese and English, even if they themselves aren’t worth more than small change.
We don’t know if these PSA cards are solely sourced from what’s been sold to GameStop stores over the last year, or if the company is buying them in bulk from other suppliers, but a combination of the two would make most sense. Either way, given the stores will have paid far less than they’re worth when they’re traded in, and are then being sold back in boxes that the majority of the time charge twice as much as the contents are worth, it’s clearly a very profitable venture for the company. But it’s definitely not one worth spending your money on. You’re far better off visiting your local independent store, or buying graded cards from trusted online marketplaces, so you can be sure you’re spending your money on the card you really want.
