30 Years Later, Collecting Pokemon Cards Hits A Little Different

I remember in the late '90s and early '00s, collecting Pokemon cards was a casual hobby. You'd go to your local brick-and-mortar store with the money you made from mowing the lawn or whatever, drop maybe $10 on a couple of packs, rip them open, then go to your middle school to trade cards with your friends. Robbers stole over $100,000 in rare cards from a California store in December 2025. A different set of robbers made off with nearly $120,000 in rare cards at gunpoint in New York in January 2026.