~*~

From Criselda Vasquez's Instagram (3 April 2026):

this isn’t just “durr hburr mainstream thing Bad i need to feel Cool” it’s just that like. collecting ANYTHING popular is such a slog to me. i love pokemon cards and i love collecting them and i love playing the tcg and i’ve been into pokemon cards for like 15 years and i think they are fun. but the recent wave of “buy them, invest in them, flip them, resell them, snatch up a whole store’s stock” is soooo exhausting. because you literally cannot avoid it as part of the hobby. it is an awful time to try to get into pokemon cards or tcg because you cannot physically get your hands on new cards. and the ppl paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to buy up new releases and restocks are not into pokemon cards for the cards - they want the monetary or social capital that comes with either (a) having extremely rare graded chase cards or (b) ‘investing’ in unopened packs that will purposefully sit in storage for the next fifteen years until they balloon in value. it’s not about pokemon it’s about profit. it’s not about the thing it’s about how to harness the idea of the thing for personal gain. you can’t engage with the Idea without necessarily inviting the Meta Idea.