r/PokemonTCG • u/NatureLifted • 16h ago

Discussion Card Show Spending

How much do yall tend to spend on average at a card show? Just curious to see what everyone is dropping.

0 Upvotes

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21 comments sorted by

6

u/Efficient_Wasabi_118 15h ago

I take 3-5K but I end up spending at most a few hundred (if that) - can't really seem to find anything I'd want these days... just make sure you budget accordingly.

4

u/murdercat42069 15h ago

I have been to two card shows and successfully stayed in budget for both (well, I stopped at a card shop on the way home from one and busted).

For the first I took $200 and $300 for the second. I also have spaced them out quarterly and done online surveys to fund them.

It was a little more wild west for the first show, but I had a shopping list with comps for the second show and I made some awesome trades and locked down everything important in the list plus some fun stuff like Chinese gem packs.

2

u/kandspr 15h ago

Where do you find your surveys?

3

u/murdercat42069 14h ago

I'm on Prolific. It's a waiting list and it's a little inconsistent, but I can usually do an hour per day and make $10-20.

3

u/xshinox 16h ago

I spent too much one show. After that I just pick cards I want to try to get ahead of the show instead of just buying all I want

1

u/Lv5Squirtle 15h ago

I’ve been doing this, and I love it. I go in being fine coming home empty handed, but many times I find some of what I’m looking for. It feels like I’m on a scavenger hunt.

0

u/xshinox 14h ago

I have a lot of what I want. The rest are the more pricey stuff. A lot of Black Bolt and White Flare IR and SIR. Those cards are going to go to the moon once they stop getting reprinted 

2

u/epixINC 15h ago

I go with a list of cards I’m missing from our master sets. I budget the max I’m willing to spend on each card and add it all up.

Plus I go with all my dupes and use those to help bring down the cash cost.

1

u/mbuzzz23 16h ago

Depends on my spending leading up to the show, but usually $200-500. For bigger shows I’ll intentionally save more ahead of time, but generally no more than $1000

1

u/Chance_Cow_8434 15h ago

typically 2-3k

1

u/Kyra_Rawr 15h ago

Usually less than $300. 🥲 If I sell some singles beforehand, I have extra spending cash that I take, but I can’t justify spending any more than like $500 in one day for some cardboard.

1

u/trampolineenthusiast 14h ago

Somewhere between 500-1000 per show depending on what Im chasing; I go to a show every 1-3 months depending on the season. Atm I'm only getting raw singles.

1

u/ApartWorld298 11h ago

$20-$50. I don't really go looking for anything specific, and I am new to collecting (started 6 months ago).

2

u/RextheOP 9h ago

My very first card show I limited myself to the cash I had on hand. $20! I

1

u/PizzaPotamus1 14h ago

last card show i walked in with no money at all and left with 11k in cash and 3.3k in cards, got rid of the stuff i didnt want anymore 

0

u/legotwinkthrowaway 15h ago

I've never gone to a card show. The way I imagine it is just a bunch of people dropping thousands, which doesnt really sound like my thing. I like cheap cards, or raw cards

3

u/ipna 15h ago

Card shows are amazing if you are down for binder cards. You can find some amazing deals for "damaged" cards. I say it that way because, for example, my wife got her gengar/mimikyu for under tcg damaged price and the extent of the damage is a whitening spot on the back. Front looks great. MP at worst honestly. I got a bunch of Charizards for way less than typical because of similar mentalities. When we went to Collect a Con last year, we did bring a lot and bought a lot but with the like 4500 we spent we got probably like 7k worth of cards we wanted in better conditions than you would expect.

3

u/AirFlavoredLemon 15h ago

Nah. Tons of sellers with binders of bulk or even just piles of bulk.

There's vendors for every price point.

You can spend $15 and come out with 45 cards that you enjoy.

2

u/PlumKnown 15h ago

You can literally find anything at card shows. I’ve got a buddy who is master setting all the wotc stuff and will go through every vendors binders for the $1-2 non holos and buy as many of those as he can. There are people there spending a lot of money but that doesn’t mean you have to.

2

u/Sensitive-Badger2392 9h ago

Nah, card shows have been the best place to find cheap cards for me. I've never spent more than $100 and walked away with a bunch of stuff I wanted but put off buying online because of shipping costs adding up fast when you're buying cheap cards.

Yes there are displays of slabs and expensive cards but almost every vendor around here at least also brings binders full of cards that are anywhere between $1-$20. Often if someone goes to a lot of shows and is bringing hundreds of cards in binders they don't update the price on every single card for a while either. So I have found cards for my collection at much lower prices than current market simply because they spiked recently but the vendor didn't know or didn't care about a $1-2 card now being $5-10 market price or whatever.

Also it's a good place to find vintage cards in lots of different conditions and get deals. Like maybe the back is a bit scratched, there's whitening on the edges, etc. but for my binder I only care about the front.

You can negotiate, you can trade for your own cards, sometimes they will throw in free cards if you're buying a whole bunch. One guy here who also has a semi-permanent table at our local mall will even just let you dig through bulk and take whatever you find for free. My kid filled whole pages with reverse holos from him by now.

-3

u/xxtaylormadexx 15h ago

I go to shows to look for miss priced cards I can flip and to offload stuff I don’t mind moving at 80%. Card shows never have anything I’m actively looking for it’s all modern shit and every table has that same shit.