A cardboard Cattiva sold for $4,000 before the Palworld Official Card Game even reached store shelves. That’s a cat-adjacent creature from a game people still call a Pokémon knockoff, priced like a used car.
When Pocketpair announced it was making a trading card game, the joke wrote itself. Palworld coming for Pokémon’s lunch money. Ha ha. Nobody’s laughing now, because the punchline turned out to be that popular TCGs are miserable for the people who actually want to play or collect them.
The eBay numbers are ridiculous
Cards for Cattiva, Chillet and Jormuntide are all listed on eBay for thousands of dollars each. The game has been on the market for roughly a day as of this writing. Some of these are already commanding prices in line with modern Pokémon chase cards, which took an entire ecosystem of grading, hype and nostalgia decades to build.
Local card shops? Largely sold out. And that’s after Pocketpair moved 3.5 million packs by early July.
Why the first few weeks are always a mess
Some context before you panic-buy anything. Everything on shelves right now is first-edition stock from the inaugural set, which means collectors and scalpers are chasing the exact same product for opposite reasons. One group wants to hold. The other wants to flip by Thursday.
The window around a new set release is reliably strange. People pay absurd premiums to own the best cards before anyone else has them, and once the set goes wide, fear of missing out does the rest of the work on their credit card.
Prices need weeks to settle. Take the Morpeko special illustration card from the Pokémon set that dropped in July. It was going for $200 before it hit retail. A couple of weeks later, its market price has fallen about 35% to roughly $127.
That $4,000 Cattiva is now a $999 Cattiva
The same correction is already visible in Palworld. As noted by GamesRadar, that Cattiva Gold Soul card that hit $4,000 pre-launch can now be bought for $999 with perfect centering. Still an outrageous number for a piece of cardboard. But a 75% drop in that timeframe tells you exactly how much of the initial price was pure adrenaline.
There’s a real irony buried in here. A game whose monster designs a lot of people describe as a “rip off” is now selling about as well as the thing it supposedly ripped off.
Palworld fans should be nervous
Reception to the card game has been mostly positive, and Palworld has already demonstrated it isn’t a flash in the pan. That combination is the problem. Sustained demand plus limited supply equals a scalping crisis, and we’ve watched this exact movie play out with Lorcana and with One Piece.
So picture the line outside Target six months from now. You ask the guy at the front what he’s waiting for, and for the first time, the answer isn’t Pokémon.
