Pokémon is releasing a TCG Valentine’s Box, but will scalpers also ruin the day of love?

A new product for the Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) has just been announced, as the company continues to ride an unprecedented wave of demand for shiny cardboard.

The Valentine’s Day box will arrive (at least overseas) on 15th January, where it will cost $15.99. Aside from being just in time for Valentine’s Day and not being too expensive, the product is actually packed with quite a lot.

Inside, there’s 20 “Collect & Share” Booster packs which each have three random cards. These cards have not been revealed yet, so we’re not sure what they look like, if they’re new cards or simply recycled cards from other sets.

Aside from the packs, the box itself is a big part of the experience. It converts into a “mailbox” intended to hold other Valentine’s Day gifts. This box and its gifts can then be decorated with two sheets of To/From label stickers, and three sheets of stickers.

The latter three sheets of stickers, as you can see in the gallery below, features Pikachu, Sylveon, Luvdisc and Jigglypuff.

This is all lovely and, once again, Pokémon has made a product that we’re sure will be adored by fans of all ages, but we have to ask if it even matters as scalpers will likely scoop up all the stock.

For those not in the loop: the huge, recent popularity of Pokémon and other TCGs has caused a deluge of scalpers to hoover up all the available stock to sell later for several times the RRP. These scalpers often use illegal methods like bots to buy items online faster and in greater numbers than humans, and a variety of underhanded tactics to clean out physical stores too.

These practices have already had a massive impact on the upcoming holiday season as real fans have found it near impossible to get their hands on the 30th anniversary set for the TCG. It would be exactly in character for the scalpers to also ruin Valentine’s Day 2027.

All we can hope is that Pokémon prints a huge amount of this item, and it continues to implement anti-scalper rules and online protections, along with working with local distributors to make sure more real people are buying their products.

[Source and Images – PokéBeach]

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