The hobby keeps arguing about a bubble: that nothing since 2021 is really rare, that a wave of supply is coming, that modern is a junk-wax era waiting to happen. It's a fair worry. But it's also testable, because we don't have to guess what happens when a Pokémon bubble bursts. The last one already burst, so I went and measured what came back.

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I took 10,639 cards that were valuable PSA 10s in 2021 (real English PSA 10 sold prices, one grade, each printing tracked on its own, nothing blended across language or condition) and checked each against what it sells for now. 69.2% have recovered to their 2021 level or higher, 30.8% are still underwater five years on. But that average hides the interesting part: which cards came back, and which stayed stuck. So I tested every obvious answer one at a time.

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Rarity first, the thing everyone reaches for. Hold it constant and look inside each tier and the same rarity label gives opposite outcomes: a Rare Ultra recovered 89% of the time or 35%, depending on something that has nothing to do with the word "Ultra." Then price: raise the floor to $25, $50, $100 and the gap doesn't close, it holds firm. Then popularity, the chase mons: that one's partly right, a Charizard or an Eeveelution recovered better in both eras. But it turned out to be half the story, not the whole thing.

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The variable that actually survived was when the card was printed:

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\- Vintage (1999 to 2010): 77% recovered

\- Middle era (2011 to 2016): 73%

\- Late pre-boom (2017 to 2019): 59%

\- Boom-era (2020 to 2021): 31%

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A gentle drift down through the pre-boom years, then a cliff at the boom. Year by year it's even cleaner: 2017 was 53%, 2018 was 60%, 2019 was 62%, then 2020 dropped to 24% and 2021 to 36%. And it's not just old Base Set padding the top: even the newest pre-boom sets (Sun & Moon, 2017 to 2019) recovered 59%, nearly double the boom era's 31%.

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The way I read it: a card came back if its demand existed before the bubble. Either the card itself predates the boom (it had already found its real level by 2019, so the mania was just a spike on top of a floor that was still there afterward), or the Pokémon is a permanent chase whose demand predates every boom. That's why a chase card printed during the boom still behaved more like an old card than its boom-era neighbors. The cards that stayed dead were the ones with neither, a new card and an ordinary subject, whose whole demand was manufactured inside the mania and vanished with it.

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So characterizing the last burst, not predicting the next: what clawed back wasn't the rarest, the priciest, or the most hyped. It was the cards whose demand existed before the mania, old cards and the handful of Pokémon people never stop wanting. Curious whether this matches what you've all seen. Anyone been sitting on a 2020 to 2021 chase card that's still nowhere near where it was, or an older one that quietly came all the way back?

Worried we're in another Pokémon bubble? I checked what recovered from the last one, 10,639 valuable-2021 PSA 10s, and it wasn't the rarest, priciest, or most hyped that came back.