The honest answer to this question is no. But the interesting answer is that the question is wrong.
Pokemon cards are not the next NFTs because Pokemon cards predate NFTs by two decades. The 1999 Base Set Charizard was doing everything an NFT promises, scarcity, verifiable ownership, speculative value, before blockchain existed. The technology was cardboard and a grading case.
What people really mean when they ask this is: are Pokemon cards in a bubble like NFTs were in 2021?
That is a better question. And the answer is complicated.
The case for bubble is strong. Logan Paul paid $16.5 million for a Pikachu Illustrator card in early 2026. That is more than most houses in San Francisco. The card is a piece of printed cardboard from 1998. It does not generate revenue. It does not pay dividends. Its value is entirely dependent on someone else wanting it more than you do.
That is the definition of speculative asset. And speculative assets correct.
Modern Pokemon cards are already correcting. Mid-range cards have dropped 20% to 45% from their 2024 peaks. Special Illustration Rares that sold for $200 now sell for $80. Full Art cards are down 40%. The market is repricing everything that was inflated by hype.
The reason is supply. The Pokemon Company printed roughly 10 billion cards in fiscal year 2024. That is down from the peak of 11.9 billion, but it is still five to seven times the annual print volume from before 2019. About 60% of all Pokemon cards ever printed were produced in the last five years. When supply explodes, prices fall. This is not complicated economics.
But here is where the NFT comparison breaks down.
NFTs in 2021 were almost entirely speculative. Most buyers did not care about the art. They cared about flipping. When the Greater Fool stopped showing up, the market collapsed because there was nothing underneath.
Pokemon cards have something underneath. They have a 30-year cultural franchise that has generated over $100 billion in lifetime revenue. They have a competitive game with organized play. They have a generation of adults who grew up with these cards and now have disposable income. They have nostalgia, which is a real economic force even if it sounds soft.
The market is also splitting in two, and this matters.
Vintage cards, the ones from 1996 to 2004, are scarce and getting scarcer. Cards from that era were thrown away, damaged, lost. A PSA 10 Base Set Charizard has a population of a few hundred. That is real scarcity. Vintage prices have held or appreciated even as modern cards correct.
Modern cards are abundant and getting more abundant. The Pokemon Company can print as many as they want. A PSA 10 of a 2024 card might have a population of 3,000 and growing. That is not scarcity. That is a commodity.
This creates two different investment theses. Vintage is fine art. Modern is sports betting.
The NFT parallel is actually closer for modern cards than for vintage. Modern Pokemon cards are being bought by speculators who have never played the game. An estimated 80% of secondary market sales come from flippers, not collectors. When flippers dominate a market, prices become disconnected from fundamentals. That is exactly what happened to NFTs.
But vintage cards are different. The people buying a $16,000 Umbreon VMAX are not flipping. They are collecting. They want to own it. The card has cultural significance beyond its price chart. That is what separates a collectible from a speculative token.
So are Pokemon cards the next NFTs?
Modern ones might be. The speculation, the oversupply, the flipper dominance. It looks similar. If you are buying modern booster boxes as an investment, you are making a bet that is closer to crypto trading than collecting.
Vintage ones are not. They have survived market cycles, recessions, generational shifts. They have proven scarcity. They have cultural depth. A 1999 Charizard is not an NFT. It is a baseball card for people who grew up on Game Boys.
The real lesson is that the format does not matter. Cards, JPEGs, tokens. What matters is whether the underlying asset has scarcity, culture, and a reason to exist beyond its price. Pokemon cards have that. Most NFTs did not.
The bubble is not in Pokemon cards. The bubble is in the belief that all Pokemon cards are investments. They are not. Some are collectibles. Some are commodities. Some are lottery tickets. Knowing the difference is the only skill that matters.