They are today's beanie babies and is a complete waste of money. Even stablecoins have a better use case than this over inflated garbage.
Today I went to a hardware store, and was humourously-surprised to find a Pokemon card vending machine there too.
As for utility: it's still entertainment. remember that this is a TCG, so there technically is still a formatted game to play with these cards. Even if most effects in older cards have been long irrelevant in competitive formats, other TCG's can have card prices surge due to new strategies being discovered.
Printing supply is not infinite, theoretical or otherwise. They are printing as much as they can, and currently have a new factory scheduled for construction. Once the factory is online, the supply & demand curve will almost certainly be affected. If it gets to a point where product is abundantly available at MSRP then suddenly the scalpers move to a different market to scalp and long lines of people camping in front of Target overnight dissipate. It will be interesting to see how the market dynamics change once the factory is complete.
Those are definitely factors, but even the most influential celebrity can't sell a turd (see: the insane advertising push for NFT's). There has to be some value in the cards themselves for an influencer to multiply it, then that lack of supply from time makes it easy for scalpers to scalp.
>they have no problem printing cards that look identical to the originals other than a small logo, which many people get and feel no need to acquire the original Charizard.
Yup. I personally am fine satisfying my nostalgia with some later print edition that is $10 instead of $1000 for some "early print" version. I don't fully understand this value of "I must have the original print!", but that admittedly existed long long before we had social media campaigns to influence such desire.
Pokemon cards, on the other hand, are veritable collectors items, like stamps or baseball cards.
Like baseball cards, their value comes from a combination of rarity and nostalgia.
Pokemon battles have some amount of entertainment value.
I mean sure, it's glorified cock fighting for kids, but that doesn't diminish the utility of the game as entertainment. It just makes it squishier.