I had a Pokémon card addiction back in 1999.

I used to get £10 a month pocket money from my grandmother and, more often than not, that crisp note would be immediately exchanged for four crinkly blue and silver booster packs that I'd rip straight open. I paid £10 once for a shiny Charizard card to complete the Base set. It's still sat in the binder I placed it in a quarter of a century ago.

Pokémon has been in and out of my life ever since. It made a major comeback in 2016 when Pokémon Go launched, and then again more recently when my young son discovered the TV show. I often watch it with him. I don't recognise all the Pokémon, but I'm pleased to see Ash hasn't aged a day.

Then, a few weeks back, my son came home with some Pokémon cards. They were in a small pack that came free with a magazine. I recognised a couple of the newer ones, Rowlet and Dedenne, along with a Seel I remembered from back in the day. The nostalgia hit me hard, so I decided to buy some boosters that we could open together.

I fired up Amazon, thinking that would be the quickest way to find some — only to be slightly confused when I saw the site's yellow "Buy" button had been replaced with a button reading "Request an Invite". I clicked it, dug into exactly what it meant, and soon discovered Pokémon card collecting in 2026 is a very, very different hobby to what it was in the late nineties.

The short version? It's currently extremely hard to buy Pokémon card packs for retail price. This probably won't come as a surprise to present-day collectors, but for someone who hasn't bought any since my teenage years, it was unexpected. I managed it in the end, but it took me two weeks, multiple supermarket visits, online lotteries, and a final stroke of luck.

The frustrating quest to find Pokémon cards in stores

Amazon's "Request an Invite" system essentially enters you into a lottery. A couple of times a week invites are sent out, enabling some lucky customers to buy the cards they requested (in two weeks I received no invites). Once I realised the process might be a slow one, I turned my attention to other IRL retailers. Pokemon Trading Card Game has an official site listing stores, and I learned through Reddit's r/PokemonDealsUK sub (I live in the UK) that other people were having some success in supermarkets like Sainsbury's, Tesco, Morrisons and ASDA.

Over the course of about a week I visited 10 of these stores, varying from small Tesco Express shops to Sainbury's superstores. On some days I visited stores that people on Reddit were specifically flagging as having received fresh stock. The shelves were always empty. Every single time, without fail, the Pokémon card section in the toy aisle would look sad and abandoned.

A few times I asked staff about stock, and the answer always came back as some variation of the following: "We don't get them in very often. And when we do, one person normally just buys the whole box."

Why are Pokémon cards so hard to buy at retail prices?

The answer, as I learned, is pretty simple: Demand currently outstrips supply. The price people are willing to pay for Pokémon cards is higher than retail price.

I found this out by looking on second hand markets like eBay and Vinted, where packs and boxes of Pokémon cards are frequently sold for far more than the £4-£5 per 10-card booster pack you can buy in the shops. Some sets, like January's very popular Ascended Heroes, are actually selling for around double the retail price. The rarest cards in that set, like the Mega Gengar Ex Special Illustration Rare, go for over £1,000.

Suddenly, the reason why one person might be going into a store and buying up the entire stock started to make more sense: They're immediately in profit. Pokémon cards now, perhaps more than ever, have become a business.

As part of my research, I reached out to Asmodee and Smiths News, two of the UK's main Pokémon card distributors, as well as three major supermarket chains. Tesco had no on-the-record comment, but acknowledged the high demand while advising that its Express stores will be stocking the new Chaos Rising set and are expecting regular deliveries. Asmodee had no comment. At the time of writing, none of the others have responded (Mashable will update this article if we do hear back).

So how do you actually get Pokémon cards?

As I eventually found out, it is possible to buy Pokémon cards at retail price. It just takes a bit of time and luck. My search quickly took me from Reddit to the OakLabs Poké Alerts Discord server, which a moderator of r/PokemonDealsUK has set up to try and help buyers find stock. So far it's been the most useful resource out there. There are stock alert pings, people sharing successful finds in the wild, and links to lotteries (like the Amazon one) run by other independent shops. Although stock still sells quickly, the Discord is full of people who've managed to beat the odds and buy the packs they want.

My first bit of luck, however, came from somewhere a bit more traditional: a local card shop in South West England. Bath TCG came up when I searched for places to buy cards near me, and I gave them a call without really expecting much. I was pleasantly surprised. They told me that they'd have stock of the new set, Chaos Rising, in for release day, and because they limit pack purchases to two per customer, they were expecting to have enough for everyone.

I headed down for the launch and found that the system worked. As promised, rather than an empty shelf, the card packs were ready and waiting. I was finally able to pick some up.

Before I left, I caught up with 35-year-old store owner, Ben Thyer, who described the current boom as a "perfect storm" created by a rise in Pokémon card streamers, flashy celebrity headlines like Logan Paul's $16 million Pikachu Illustrator record auction, and the fact that 2026 is the 30th anniversary of the card game.

"We're seeing the people that would buy trainers and stuff, to flip for profit, now coming over to Pokémon to do the same thing," Thyer told me. "It used to be you could buy Pokémon, everyone would buy it to open and enjoy, some people would keep it sealed but the return would be in four, five, six years. Currently, because of how the market is and how sparse it is, the return is instant."

Unlike many retailers, Bath TCG counters this with a tiered system. Players of the game are in Tier 1, loyal customers — who've already made several purchases — are in Tier 2, and everyone else is in Tier 3. All booster packs are limited to a certain number per customer, depending on the tier they fall into. Seals on booster boxes are broken to discourage resellers. All of this means that the stock doesn't immediately vanish when the doors open, and there are enough packs for everyone.

When I asked Thyer why distributors aren't simply supplying more cards to meet demand, he said that they are. But demand also means more retailers are ordering from distributors, including stores like Hobbycraft and The Entertainer that didn't used to sell Pokémon cards. This means the likes of Bath TCG aren't able to get any additional stock, despite stock levels in the UK being higher overall.

And as for whether or not this stock scarcity situation will change anytime soon? Thyer wasn't too hopeful.

"This is like a cyclical thing that we see sort of every three to four years, but it normally lasts six to nine months and it's not that intense," he said. "It's not really showing any signs of slowing down at the moment."