I Spent $100K Flipping Pokémon Cards. Here’s How It Went

Saving money on spent 100k flipping pok does not have to be complicated. We rounded up the essentials so you can spend less and skip the guesswork.

Key Takeaways

• I Spent $100K Flipping Pokémon Cards.
• Here’s How It Went Advertiser Disclosure Our readers always come firstThe content on DollarSprout includes links to our advertising partners...
• When you read our content and click on one of our partners’ links, and then decide to complete an offer , whether it’s downloading an app, o...

I Spent $100K Flipping Pokémon Cards. Here’s How It Went Advertiser Disclosure

Our readers always come first

The content on DollarSprout includes links to our advertising partners. When you read our content and click on one of our partners’ links, and then decide to complete an offer , whether it’s downloading an app, opening an account, or some other action , we may earn a commission from that advertiser, at no extra cost to you.

Our ultimate goal is to educate and inform, not lure you into signing up for certain offers. Compensation from our partners may impact what products we cover and where they appear on the site, but does not have any impact on the objectivity of our reviews or advice.

With a naive sense of confidence, I spent six figures buying and selling Pokémon cards during the pandemic-fueled TCG boom. Here's how I fared (and a few lessons I learned) during my trip down nostalgia lane.

Written by Ben Huber Last Updated: April 1, 2025 Reviewed by Megan Robinson, CMC®

1. Home
2. Side Hustles

Jeff Proctor | DollarSprout

If there were a silver lining to be found amidst an angst-filled 2020, it was that numerous people had the free time to rediscover things that were previously key to them.

Reconnecting (virtually) with old friends, their love for being outdoors, a rekindled fire for an old hobby. You name it, we learned a lot about what we used to do during our downtime way back when handheld technology didn’t occupy our every waking moment. After all, even binge-watching Netflix gets boring after a few weeks. 

The latter of those aforementioned rediscoveries , an old hobby , turned out to be the most unexpected, but one of the more welcome, developments to resurface during my last trip around the sun. Six months and six figures later I’m sharing the lessons I learned flipping Pokemon trading cards to make money during the pandemic. 

A Pleasant Surprise 

It’s mid-October and I’m trapped at home like millions of other Americans, weary of the restrictions put in place to help stop the spread of COVID-19. (I work from home, so this isn’t new to me. But I do enjoy the occasional Starbucks workday.) I’m mindlessly scrolling my Facebook news feed and up pops the dreaded “Suggested for You” section that almost never contains content I’m actually interested in. 

But today was different. Today, Facebook’s algorithm accidentally guessed correctly. (The digital marketer in me can appreciate the cookie-setting, browser-spying, API-integrating, web property-tracking behemoth that Facebook is.) 

They flashed the one headline my eyes (and mouse) simply couldn’t gloss over. 

I was flabbergasted. I had those. A whole binder full of those. Who didn’t? A late-eighties baby, I turned double digits at the height of the Pokemon boom.

For several years, I begged my mom to purchase me single packs at a local card shop, Target, 7-Eleven, wherever one could find them. Laughably, I did chores at an unprecedented clip.

The shiny cardboard. The glossing over them with friends on the school bus. The immense jealousy of the kids that had better cards (that their parents bought them, cheaters). 

The nostalgia.

I watched it, the entire video. All 25 minutes of it. (Spoiler alert: Leonhart didn’t pull a $100,000 card in that video, but he did pull one worth $500,000 in this later-published video.) 

And just like that, I was entirely re-hooked. The child-like giddiness of getting to watch someone open packs, and of course, wanting to now do it myself, had re-emerged. 

Reality Check 

And just like that, the brakes got pumped. A quick eBay search showed the packs that I was accustomed to forking over $2.99 for in 1999 had swelled to over $600 each.

Turns out that when the most popular franchise of all time (and it is not even close) stops printing the original vintage cards, nearly twenty years later, the cost continues to increase as supply drops. 

After all, it’s not like they printed unlimited sealed packs. Wizards of the Coast (the original designer-manufacturer of the cards in the U.S.) produced a few tens-of-thousands of sealed packs of various print runs, and that was it. Production stopped in 2003, and the rest is history (Nintendo took over and began their own card series). 

To add salt to my now wounded psyche, I discovered I had done what every 2020 Pokemon re-discoverer kicked themselves for. I sold my entire collection on eBay years earlier for what now amounted to pennies on the dollar. $112.00 for entire completed Base, Fossil, and Jungle sets, among other assorted incomplete sets/semi high-value cards. Fail.  

Not all hope was lost, however, as now, twenty years later, I was armed with two very key pieces of ammunition to once again rebuild my collection: disposable income and digital marketing knowledge. 

Turning a Hobby into a Side Hustle

To the fervent card collector, one who holds the view that a card’s intrinsic value is measured in memories, not its monetary worth, the rest of this article may present as a nuisance plaguing the hobby.

But I promise there are several ways to flip undervalued cards without harming the hobby in the same way that scalpers prevent the next generation of Pokemon lovers (and nostalgic adults) from finding product on modern store shelves. 

And to that effect, that is where my October Pokemon rediscovery began. I spent weeks in early-to-mid October studying the value of the vintage products I was already familiar with , both sealed packs and single Wizards of the Coast (WOTC)-era cards.

(The modern Pokemon sets also have higher-value cards , in the several hundred to even several thousand dollar range , but I felt like I didn’t know enough about them yet to devote income/resources to cards I didn’t fully understand.)

I wanted to make at least semi-informed decisions about the cards I was buying. I wanted to have a systematic way of approaching and identifying undervalued cards, and an equally systematic way for selling them, taking any guesswork/emotional attachment out of the process. 

Related: 41 Ways to Make Money Fast 

Developing a Working System 

My initial due diligence led me to discover that eBay “comps,” as they’re called, were an simple way to get a snapshot idea of what recently sold cards were going for that week.

eBay’s recently sold filters allow users to get an idea of the current market or “comparative” cost for a particular card. Screenshot | eBay

Furthermore, third-party enthusiast sites like TCGplayer or even grading services such as Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) have indexes that allow you to see, perhaps most importantly, the historical trends of raw and graded card prices. 

Historical cost trend for a PSA 10-graded Base Set Unlimited Charizard Holographic Pokemon card. Screenshot | PSA Website

Using these sources, you can quickly construct a spreadsheet of the current market value of cards circulating on for-sale platforms. During my research, I built a sheet that tracked the prices of popular vintage cards in the original WOTC prints , and mostly holographic cards, at that.

I intentionally went for higher-value cards not only because they had higher margins (and downside protection against occasional losses) but also because of their enhanced liquidity/sales volume (they are generally more sought-after cards despite their relative rarity). 

Now, I had never forayed into card-grading as a pre-teen. But it quickly became apparent that getting max-value for a specific Pokemon card was to acquire near-mint to mint versions of high-margin cards and then send them in to get graded (which increases the value anywhere from 2-10x the “raw” or ungraded value of the card). 

There was only one problem: grading cards takes time and the market can move quickly , especially with the bubble/meteoric rise in card prices that the pandemic brought about.

With turnaround times at major grading services ranging anywhere from a few days to over a year, I didn’t want to absorb the risk of buying cards, sending them off to get graded, and then have to watch helplessly as the cost point/support that I bought

Final Thoughts

Before you check out, double-check spent 100k flipping pok against current offers and any coupons you can stack. Small habits like this add up to real savings over a year.

Originally published at dollarsprout.com.