caution: whatnot gambling addiction

this is just me giving my own personal warning before i quit pokemon purchasing on whatnot and maybe even collecting for a long time. i tried to see if there were threads similar to my experience on reddit, but i don’t think there are any i found. so, instead i wanna just talk about my experience to caution anyone before they make a horrible financial decision they will regret down the line.

whatnot is a great idea at the foundation: getting pokemon cards for $1 or a very low price typically through auctions, where you can see the cards in real time.

once you begin purchasing more cards though, you get down to the rabbit hole — the so called “character breaks” where you get a 1/4 chance of getting a prismatic ETB at a low cost of $20-30 (you end up winning a korean pack instead every time). of course, the sellers who tell you to bid responsibly while yelling about the cards being supposedly undervalued and doing short sudden deaths, purposely misleading many naive viewers on the actual value of the cards toward purchasing significantly over market price (please beware of the mass viewer streamers, too many do this and get away with it). let’s not even talk about “rip til you hits” having people spend $50-150 just to get a $3 IR card.

i started purchasing on whatnot with the idea i wanted to get cards i liked at a more affordable price after a frustrating experience with not getting hits and having a hard time getting packs for retail with insane scalping prices.

but with each additional dollar, the costs culminate. as i went further down the rabbit hole, this somehow led me to spending hundreds on character breaks, and the best thing i got from it was a perfect order ETB, i wish i were joking. just today, a streamer was yelling about their cards being significantly undervalued for market during auction, and i bought into it just to find out i was scammed and bid a card 4-5x over the market price after checking comps on ebay and multiple sites other than TCG. from this stupid mistake, i realized i wasn’t purchasing pokemon because i even enjoyed it anymore. i just wanted a chance at getting a good deal that i had a hard time getting my hands on otherwise.

yes: i am in therapy and a college student who makes dumb financial decisions because of a severely underdeveloped frontal cortex. i only recently back into pokemon because of wanting to fill a void of what was previously a large part of my childhood. however, i realized that many scummy sellers exist now who monopolize on average people who simply want to enjoy and collect pokemon like me. i’m not trying to generalize the entire whatnot community, i’ve met a lot of great people on the app. but for the most part, i rather use my story to caution you on purchasing pokemon on whatnot especially if you’re just a just the average pokemon normie and collector. this will likely be the last time i collect pokemon in a while because of how upset i am at myself. thank you for listening to my ted talk.