Of Pokémon-Senate analogies, and ultra expensive cards

With the speed things are happening in the Senate at the moment, Alan Peter Cayetano’s Pokémon-Senate analogies feel like a whole month ago, when in reality, it just happened last weekend.

Was anyone amused at the analogies? If anyone was, I haven’t seen it.

I scanned X, and I saw mostly a Snorlax’s worth of detritus slung at the senator, whose infamy has seemingly grown with every Facebook Live session of his. “Pokemon ng ina mo, Cayetano!” one post went, while many others deplored his dragging the good name of Pokémon into the mess. “Don’t drag Pokemon into this,” one said.

By one X user’s assessment, the analogy was shallow because Cayetano is a known fan of the franchise and a recognizable figure specifically in its card-collecting circles, regularly seen at shops and conventions.

With the Senate’s integrity itself now under scrutiny, reducing the whole mess to Pokémon cards — and not even in a particularly clever way — felt needlessly exhausting for the Facebook crowd. (Fine, he said it was an explanation for the kids, but honestly, I don’t think kids would have bought it either; the kids would have said, “Open the packs!”)

Or we could take this suggestion on Facebook on how they would’ve gone about with “Pokemonification” of the Senate, comparing the Cayetanos to the the series villains, Team Rocket:

One X user pretty much summed it up: “He just used the titles of those Pokemon Trading Card sets. That’s it. No deeper meaning or clever analogy. I know that Cayetano is a big Pokemon fan, so I expected that maybe he could have at least used some profound reference.”

“But like the dramas in the Senate, SHALLOW!”

But one comment struck me more: “If I was a senator. I would keep my Pokemon TCG (trading card game) collection on the down low. Why would you even flaunt this expensive hobby?  When the majority of poor Filipinos are struggling financially.” 

I know that these cards get quite expensive, some in the millions. But I wanted to find out more just how much potential value these cards and the packs that Cayetano flaunted have.

And as I found out: Somewhere along the way, Pokémon cards stopped being children’s toys and became assets, stores of value, and many other things involving many, many dollars.

Like NBA or baseball cards that can fetch millions of dollars, Pokémon cards now involve very adult money.

There’s a simple explanation: nostalgia. Children who grew up with Pokémon are now adults with disposable income, and many of them are trying to buy back fragments of childhood in foil packaging and hard plastic slabs.

Thirty years since the first games in the series — Pokémon Red and Green — were released in February 1996, the franchise has amassed around $147 billion in lifetime revenue.

It’s not Mickey Mouse, Batman, or Star Wars that’s the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. It’s Pokémon.

An estimated 75 billion cards are now in circulation.

Some are naturally worth more than others. One famous example is social media personality Logan Paul’s rare Pikachu Illustrator card, which he bought for more than $5 million in 2021 and later sold for over $16.5 million (with a diamond necklace thrown in as a bonus) according to CNBC. It became the most expensive trading card ever sold, topping a Mickey Mantle baseball card ($12.6 million), and a Michael Jordan-Kobe Bryant basketball card ($13 million)

And that example captures the strange place Pokémon cards now occupy in the modern economy. They are collectibles, yes, but also speculative instruments — their own “stock market for millennials,” as The Guardian puts it. Adults snap up boxes upon boxes of cards hoping to strike cardboard gold — often leaving actual children unable to find packs at retail stores. (See Alan? Think about the kids!)

Scalpers and resellers swarm the market too.

There are certainly those who just love it as a hobby, but there are others who truly look at it as a stock investment that even outperforms traditional ones.

Fortune wrote that “the average Pokémon card is increasing at nearly 46% — a pace far exceeding hot stocks like Nvidia so far in 2025 or the S&P 500’s average 12% annual return rate.” 

(I knew I should have kept one of my cards I got as a kid safe.) 

One major accelerant is social media. Videos of rare “pulls,” grading reveals, and auction sales rack up millions upon millions of views online, feeding hype and pushing prices even higher.

And like every overheated market fueled by nostalgia and internet hype, things eventually got, well, wilder.

An auction house trading card expert interviewed by CNBC said parts of the high-end market are now driven by people who made money off crypto — buyers who talk about Pokémon cards the same way traders talk about coins and tokens. According to the expert, many buyers are “not genuine collectors” but investors chasing “high-end assets” or even business entities capitalizing on the booming vintage-card economy “because of how lucrative the general market is for all these vintage cards.”

We are, to be clear, talking about laminated cartoon monsters. Yet some now trade like “blue-chip art,” as Forbes puts it — especially if a card gets graded a perfect 10 in terms of condition.

And like blue-chip art, these cards have reportedly become useful for money laundering too.

The Telegraph reported on a coordinated operation by Spanish and Swedish authorities that uncovered an alleged money-laundering scheme involving Pokémon cards.

The logic is simple enough: expensive, easy to transport, globally desirable, and difficult to trace. One expert interviewed by the paper noted that cards can be exchanged online with far less scrutiny than traditional financial assets.

A financial crime expert told The Telegraph: “It’s just a small piece of lightweight paper…. So if I have just a few of them, I can move millions instead of having a suitcase full of cash.”

And it doesn’t stop there. Like jewelry stores, card shops themselves have become robbery targets. CNN reported on thefts involving hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cards across cities including Las Vegas, New York, Vancouver, and Nottingham. Imagine, a piece of cardboard that could be just as expensive as jewelry.

So from a kid’s pastime to a true-blue lottery ticket, Pokémon cards now occupy a strange middle space where memory, money, and meaning overlap — and whose market now includes not just kids and genuinely nostalgic millennials but crypto bros, money laundering crime gangs, influencers, profiteers, and investors.

Which perhaps explains why seeing Pokemon dragged into Senate drama irritated fans even further. Kids once fought over Charizards. Adults now fight over grading slabs, insane market prices, and now, Senate metaphors.

Or then again, it’s also possible that for many critics, the Pokémon analogy merely became the latest vehicle for a frustration with Cayetano that already existed beforehand. – Rappler.com