My brother succumbed to scalpers and bought one of the Digimon starter decks, he gave me the booster pack it came with and...
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My favorite Digimon of all time was the rare card of the pack.
It's all coming up milthouse.
I'm not super sure if scalpers are the reason the digimon tcg is so expensive, because normally, the prices eventually go down as more supply comes in and people just don't buy the items that the scalpers are selling for too much.
But, in the case of the Digimon TCG, there was a period of time where products were being sold for MSRP, but then randomely spiked around January of this year, and it hasn't gone down to the original msrp since. To me, it seems more likely that Bandai is just not printing enough of them to meet the demand, which honestly might be even worse than scalpers because if there just isn't enough cards floating around, what's the point in even playing?
It's a huge shame that literally everying Digimon TCG related is so expensive, because it's honestly one of the most interesting TCGS I've looked at from a mechanical perspective. But I can't really afford to spend $40+ on a single beginner deck.