Before the Palworld Official Card Game had even landed on retail shelves, a piece of cardboard printed with Cattiva changed hands for $4,000. That’s a cat-ish creature from a title plenty of people still dismiss as a Pokémon knockoff, carrying the price tag of a used car.
The gag practically wrote itself when Pocketpair revealed it was building a trading card game: Palworld going after Pokémon’s lunch money. Very funny. The laughs have stopped, though, because the actual punchline is that successful TCGs tend to be miserable experiences for the people who genuinely want to play them or collect them.
The eBay numbers are ridiculous
Head to eBay and you’ll find Cattiva, Chillet and Jormuntide cards each carrying four-figure asking prices. At the time of writing, the game has existed commercially for about 24 hours. A few of these listings already sit at the level of modern Pokémon chase cards — cards that needed decades of grading infrastructure, hype and nostalgia to reach those heights.
Your local card shop probably can’t help either; most have sold through. That’s despite Pocketpair having shifted 3.5 million packs by the start of July.
Why the first few weeks are always a mess
A little context is worth having before you panic-buy. Every product currently in stores is first-edition stock from the debut set, so collectors and scalpers are hunting identical boxes for completely opposite reasons — one side intends to keep them, the other intends to have flipped them by Thursday.
That launch window is dependably weird. Buyers hand over ludicrous premiums just to hold the best cards before anybody else can, and once the set is widely available, FOMO finishes off whatever their credit card had left.
It takes weeks for prices to find a floor. Consider the Morpeko special illustration card from July’s Pokémon set: it traded at $200 ahead of its retail arrival. Two weeks or so on, its market value has slid roughly 35%, down to about $127.
That $4,000 Cattiva is now a $999 Cattiva
Palworld is already showing the same correction. GamesRadar points out that the Cattiva Gold Soul card that reached $4,000 before launch is now available at $999 with flawless centering. That’s still a preposterous sum for printed cardboard — but a 75% collapse over that stretch shows just how much of the original figure was nothing but adrenaline.
There’s genuine irony in all of this. A game plenty of people characterise as a “rip off” on the strength of its monster designs is now moving roughly as much product as the franchise it allegedly ripped off.
Palworld fans should be nervous
The card game has been received well overall, and Palworld long ago proved it wasn’t a one-hit wonder. Which is precisely the trouble. Demand that keeps going, paired with supply that doesn’t, produces a scalping crisis — the same film we sat through with Lorcana and again with One Piece.
So imagine the queue snaking outside Target half a year from now. You ask whoever’s at the front what they’re there for, and for once, they don’t say Pokémon.