Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Pokémon trading card game. I'm David Imel. In the last couple of years, Pokémon cards have gone from a fun collectible card game to an entire market. There's a massive ecosystem taking place here, from casual collectors to players to bulk buyers and even Discord bot servers. The Pokémon Company recently released a 30th anniversary celebration set of the cards, which was notably different from the way that other sets have been released, both in just the sheer volume flooding the market and in the rarity of these cards. This has caused a lot of drama and sparked a lot of conversations in the community. So, I wanted to bring on The Verge's Charles Pulliam-Moore to talk about it. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.
This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 29th, 2026. Today's OpenAI Dev Day, one of the biggest events of the year for the company, and it kicked it off by announcing Dots, a Meta Muse competitor. OpenAI says that Dots is an always-on AI assistant that can do nearly anything across connected apps in the background while learning your preferences over time. Dots is powered by GPT-6 Astra and lives at a cloud computer, which gives it access to a web browser and over 4,000 supported apps. Dots will also be available in Microsoft Teams and Slack. OpenAI says soon you'll be able to interact with it over text messages as well.
Next, Nothing announced its first pair of professional headphones, the Nothing Headphone 1 Pro. The $399 pair of over-ear headphones offers a triple-driver design, LDAC support, and a dedicated flat EQ switch, which removes the audio processing. The goal here is to offer a single pair of headphones that you can use to enjoy your music, as well as a profile you can use to mix your music with. John Higgins says that the active noise cancellation's not quite as good as the industry leaders, but it is the best of any Nothing headphones so far.
And finally, Google officially confirmed it will stop updating ChromeOS in 2034. On the one hand, it's not that big of a surprise as the company shifts its attention to Google Book OS, but on the other hand, it means that if you bought a Chromebook this year, you probably won't be getting those 10 years of software updates. Or maybe your Chromebook will just turn into a Google Book. Google has said that many Chromebooks will be capable of upgrading to Google Book OS, so hopefully more details emerge before 2034. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 29th, 2026.
Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift giving right. You probably have a few in your life — people who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like and buy things here and there throughout the year. My mom has always been the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip: Prime Big Deal Days is coming October 6th and 7th. That means that for two straight days, you can get deals on those kitchen gadgets for your dad, electronics for your brother, fitness equipment for your bestie, toys for the cousins, and so much more. There's new deals dropping every day, so you can become one of those expert gift givers that we all know. And it's all happening with plenty of lead time into the holidays, so no more scrambling to come up with something last minute. The hardest part will be finding a good hiding place for it all. Mark your calendars. Shop new deals every day this Prime Big Deal Days, October 6th and 7th.
Charles Pulliam-Moore, welcome to the Vergecast.
Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for having me here.
So, you just wrote a story on the site about the state of the Pokémon scalping ecosystem and what's happening with this 30th anniversary set. Just to set the stage here, can you explain why Pokémon cards in particular are such an insane commodity right now? I feel like I could buy these when I was a kid, but the last couple of years it's just exploded into like its own ecosystem.
Yeah. I mean, you know, you bringing up you being able to buy them when you were a kid, that's part of it, right? I'm not sure how old you are exactly, but I imagine we were both there for the beginning of Pokémon. What's happening right now is kind of sort of similar to what happened when the cards first like hit the streets. There was all kinds of news coverage about how popular the game was and how like cards were just out of stock. Back in the '90s, people were not so sophisticated in terms of their pursuit of these things, right? It was just kind of like, all right, you're going to go to your Toys R Us or KB Toys and see what happens to be in stock and you just make do with what you've got.
But now in 2026, the Pokémon brand hasn't gone away, right? Like it has only gotten bigger and sort of more popular over the years, and that has translated into an intense focus on the cards, right? And in 2026 in particular, in this moment in which like hustle culture has sort of evolved into this beast of a thing where everyone's sort of like looking for quick ways to make money and then encourage other people how to do it, Pokémon sort of represents like an ideal kind of commodity to sort of like pounce on. I feel like every other month we're hearing a story about like, oh, these cards from the base set just sold for an exorbitant amount of money. That makes absolutely no sense. And some of that is because, you know, people have nostalgia for the cards, but it's also sort of the card collecting has kind of taken on a life of its own that is fascinating and distressing all at the same time.
Yeah. Just to sort of brief people on this, do you know why these decided to randomly take off? When exactly did these start taking off? Because I feel like it was around 2020 or so, but I could be mistaken here.
Yeah. I mean, Pokémon has, again, Pokémon's always been popular. It's all like shades of this have always sort of been present within the Pokémon fandom and within the Pokémon card collecting community, but I do think that the pandemic really made things worse for a number of reasons and in a number of different ways, right? During the pandemic, people were at home. You know, everyone was just on their computers because they couldn't go anywhere. And Pokémon's an easy way to grab attention, right? Whether it be, oh, I have some cards here and I'm going to open them on camera, or like I'm going to show you the kinds of unexpected places that you might be able to buy Pokémon cards. That all really got big at a point in time when everyone's attention was much more on the internet because they just weren't outside. And now, you know, things that the pandemic — it's not over, but it's, you know, the lockdowns are obviously relaxed. We're able to go outside, but this intensity has sort of not gone away. It's just sort of intensified over time, and now with the rise of platforms like TikTok has kind of exacerbated it just because there are more avenues through which people can consume this kind of content.
Yeah. So you're saying that there's sort of like a new market for this content's consumption which is driving people to actually go and make it.
Yeah. Yeah. Like Pokémon's always been here. I feel like, you know, social media in 2026 has given Pokémon a new level of brand exposure to people, right? There are just more people who are aware like, "Oh, those games are still going on. Oh, the card game is still like a thing."
I remember being in New York in like 2017 and like walking through a Target and you'd just walk by the card selection or the card section and there would just be stacks and stacks and stacks of Pokémon cards. You could just buy them very casually, which wasn't indicative of them not being popular, but it was more that the community of people who were focused on it was much smaller. And now it feels like more people are much more aware of the fact that like, yeah, certain Pokémon cards can be very valuable. There are people who are willing to spend quite a bit of money for them. And in that realization, people are like, "Ooh, I could also make some money off of this." And so, people have just really kind of pounced on it. A lot of what we're seeing with Pokémon right now, it's not new, right? This is like sneakerheads now. Like this is just how it's always been. Not always, but sneakers have existed in this kind of space for a much longer time where people are willing to line up out front of stores for hours on end just to get like a pair of Jordans that they are maybe going to wear once or twice before they flip them to someone else. Sneakers — there are all kinds of like difficulties with selling sneakers, right? Like people don't have the same size feet. So, it's like, all right, like I've got like this shoe in a size eight, so maybe you know, I can flip that. But with Pokémon cards, it's just kind of like it's just the card, right? We don't have to get into the whole like ecosystem of like grading and stuff because that's its own kind of thing.
Probably its own Vergecast. Yeah. But it's like, oh, you pull, you know, this Lugia card and you know that like it's worth a few hundred, and so the goal is to like buy up as much product as you can, maybe pull that card, flip it, or you sell that product with the intention being like you are looking to get this into the hands of people who are trying to like chase that thing.
Yeah, I want to get into that because I think we've all seen a lot of people taking videos of Target store openings, right? It'll be like 7:00 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. There's a line of people outside of a Target. They're rushing in trying to grab as much product as they can. What's the deal with that? Are they like just reselling as many cards as they can in unopened, or are they ripping them open and then trying to sell the rare cards? What's generally happening there?
It varies. I've gone to a couple of these like — I don't want to call it like a lineup event. Like I've been standing out in front of a Best Buy, you know, before it opens just to get my hands on some cards because it's almost impossible to buy them online at this point. Brick and mortar stores tend to be sort of like your best bet to like get something. And just having conversations with those people, it's a multitude of different types of folks who are doing this. Some of them are scalpers, resellers. Some of them are just like casual fans like myself. I've got a huge collection and I just, you know, I have them to look at them. You know, I'm not a competitive player or anything. It's a mix, right? I think, weirdly enough, the let's line up in front of a store of it all — where does that come from? Some of it is like sneakerhead culture, but like a lot of it I feel like got popularized by Apple, right? Like with iPhone launches. Like I don't think people — Apple's gotten better about making sure that they have adequate stock to deal with, you know, the people who actually want to get the phone. But in those early days, it was a thing that people did for fun. It's like, I'm going to be — we're going to camp outside of the Apple store to get the thing. That was the Apple of it all. That felt very much sort of like an event of sorts, right? It was something that people treated like a fun thing to do. Whereas with Pokémon cards, it's more sort of like get there early, get your stuff, go home, and do with it what you will.
Mhm. Yeah. Well, a lot of these people are basically scalping these cards, right? So, I want to talk about the scalper ecosystem a little bit here. Let's talk about it. In your piece, you sort of mentioned that there are these Discord channels that you can pay for that will give you access to scalping bots that can basically automatically buy a ton of different packs online as soon as they release. Can you talk a little bit more about that ecosystem and how that's evolved over time?
