In recent years, the foreign Pokémon card market has been plagued by price speculation, and the originally affordable Pokémon cards have often swelled to a level that is difficult for ordinary people to accept after being hyped by anchors, painters and collectors.
In addition to the common "rarity", "card attributes" and even "artist signature", there is another detail that does not attract much attention - "Waifu".
The "Waifu Card" with a beautiful face and cute drawing style is now setting off a new round of price waves in the Pokémon card trading market.
"Waifu" was originally the name of foreign anime fans for their favorite two-dimensional women, meaning "my wife", and the so-called "Waifu card" in the Pokémon card refers to the card with female characters in the card, whether it is a support card or a prop card, as long as it is drawn with exquisite beauty and young standing paintings, it can be classified as "Waifu card".
Draw "Waifu cards" with different trainers
More than a month ago, Pokémon card officially released the latest expansion packs "Scarlet EX" and "Violet EX" in Japan, these two card expansion packs correspond to the latest "Zhu/Zi" two versions of the Pokémon series, and similar to the game design, Pokémon cards will also add some exclusive "version limited cards", which can generally only be opened in specific booster packs.
Usually, although different versions have different limited cards, the official will try to balance the strength and rarity of the limited cards as much as possible in case the price of a certain version is too high. From the trailer, there is no single card that is too unbalanced in the Zhu / Zi expansion package this time, and it stands to reason that the prices of the two on the market should be very close.
But according to Japan2UK, a well-known British card import website, the current price of the Pokémon Zhu Edition booster pack is 84.99 pounds, while the price of the purple version is as high as 149.99 pounds:
The Purple Edition's nearly doubling in price has nothing to do with the strength and rarity of its cards, but in one of the key limited-edition support cards, Mimosa.
Mimosa is one of the NPCs that appears in the Pokémon Vermilion version, and is a nurse who provides healing services for Pokémon, and the card effect is to wash up to 5 Pokémon from the discard pile into the card library and draw three cards at the same time.
This card can only be considered decent in today's colorful Pokémon system, and it is reasonable to say that it will not attract the attention of players, but the point is that Mimosa has now become the "Waifu card" in the eyes of players.
Compared with other popular physical card games, the Pokémon style is more two-dimensional, so the card face standing painting of female characters is also more likely to attract the attention of players, in order to get the beautifully painted Mimosha, many people are even willing to spend dozens of times higher than the original price to buy this card, and this additional price is also known as "Waifu tax" in player circles.
This "Waifu tax" born of love has basically spread to most cards with standing drawings of characters. For example, even if the same type of support card in the same booster pack, a card with a female C position will be about $10 more expensive than a male card with the same rarity level.
This trend of advocating "Waifu card" has been further amplified after the official launch of the special "full picture card" category.
In the past, the top half of the Pokémon card face was often a vertical drawing pattern, and the lower part was a text description of the card effect, but starting from the "black/white" version, the concept of "full drawing card" was officially introduced in the card design, filling the entire card with illustrations.
Three different styles of the same card, the two on the right are "full picture cards"
The original card rarity system has also been modified accordingly, and the original "rare" level has been subdivided into more attributes such as "R, RR, SR, UR", etc., in addition to the different icons and numbers, it is more important to hire different artists to create card faces of different rarity.
Even if they are both "full-picture cards", there will be a large difference in pricing due to different standing paintings. Like the picture above, the key card "Mimosha" that led to the appreciation of the purple booster pack this time, and according to the rarity, Mimosha also has different styles of card faces, the far right represents the highest rarity "SAR" level, usually has a more "artistic" illustration style.
If a card is defined as a "Waifu card" and has a special "SAR" rarity, the price it can get on the secondary market will be very amazing. According to data from the Cardmarket website, the "Mimosha" card released in January this year, its rarer "SAR" card face, has now reached a maximum price of 750 euros, which is three times that of ordinary full-picture cards.
Although the corresponding limited card Arven in the Zhu version supplement pack has a heavier role in the plot, because the character is male, even the rarest "SAR" is only 32 euros on the market.
Arven's rare card face
In today's Pokémon card trading market, such "unspoken rules" have become very common, such as in the previous generation of the "Sword/Shield" version, there was a set of series of full-picture cards called "Trainer Gallery", which featured trainers and Pokémon appearing on cards at the same time.
This style of card expands the artist's creative space. A full-picture card of "Swimsuit Xiaoxia + Jewel Starfish" can also be bought for $40 now, but the card face is a "Goo Goo + Male Trainer" card, which is now priced at only $1, and there is basically no collectible value.
$1 "Goo" and $40 "Jewel Starfish"
This craze for collecting Waifu cards, in addition to affecting the market price of a single card, also affects the price of the card holder itself. As mentioned earlier, the price of booster packs that may carry "Mimosha" has been nearly doubled, even if it may not be able to open the corresponding card in the end.
For card lovers who are mainly male groups, "swimsuit girls" are naturally more attractive than bald monks, and in addition to absolute protagonists like Xiaoxia, other "general passerby" NPCs will also get unexpected popularity because of their special appearance.
The most typical example is this "tourist card", which is also highly respected by players in the Pokémon card circle of Chinese:
The characters in this card first appeared in the seventh generation of Pokémon "Sun/Moon", and their main role is to act as an "experience pack" - fighting against players and losing matches.
This kind of NPC with little drama will appear in large numbers in each generation of games, from "bug catcher boy" to "juggler", they are basically named after a common title, and "tourist NPC" is even more perfunctory, the setting is ordinary trainers from other regions, which will not attract the attention of players.
However, in the premium booster pack "TAG TEAM GX and Celebrity Collection" released in 2019, the official who knows the commercial value of the "sister card" officially launched a full-picture card version of the tourists:
Although the name of the card is still ordinary "tourist", with the blessing of the full-drawn card face, this standard sister card with outstanding appearance quickly became the object of player collection, and now you can still find a large number of four-digit tourist flashcards on Idle Fish.
Compared with other "famous and surnamed" protagonist cards, this tourist can be regarded as a typical example of appearance determining destiny.
In the Pokémon card circle, it is the standing painting, the character on the card face and the popularity that determine the price of the sister card, which has nothing to do with the strength of the card, which also leads to more ordinary players being implicated.
In fact, in addition to the unique Waifu card, the Pokémon card market has always had the characteristics of hype and inflated prices, and some cards with special attributes and backgrounds have been speculated to a very outrageous height due to the publicity of the anchor.
The most famous of these is YouTuber Logan Paul, who frequently uses various eye-catching tactics to increase his popularity and the price of a certain card.
For example, he walked into the ring with a "Charizard" card, which he bought for $5.27 million
For the larger and more popular "Waifu cards", it is difficult to determine whether it is the player's love for "Waifu" that has brought them to the attention, or the price increase caused by the buying by collectors with a keen sense of smell.
In short, for ordinary players, the growing "Waifu tax" will not only continue to increase the popularity of the game, but also add another fire to the already inflated Pokémon card market, and I don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.