What a £4 pack of cards reveals about value, chance, and the stories markets choose to believe
By Richard Kirtley
I wasn’t trying to make a point about the economy when I bought a packet of Pokémon cards. It was £4, an almost forgettable purchase, the kind you make without really interrogating it. Nostalgia, more than anything else. A quiet pull back to something simple, something familiar, something that belonged to a time when value felt easier to understand. You bought the cards, you played the game, you traded with friends. There was a logic to it, even if it was childlike. So I opened the first pack without much ceremony, half-present, not expecting anything remarkable. And nothing remarkable happened. No sparkle, no sense of discovery, just a handful of cards that, in another moment, would have been enough.
But something lingered. Not quite disappointment, not quite dissatisfaction, more like a question that hadn’t finished forming. A sense that there was still something there, just out of reach. It’s a strange feeling, because it doesn’t belong to reason. Rationally, the experience was complete. The transaction had ended, but emotionally, it felt unfinished, as if the story hadn’t quite played out. That was enough. Enough to go back, enough to pick up a second pack, enough to step, however lightly, into a moment that felt like it carried more weight than it should have.
There is a particular kind of tension in opening a pack of Pokémon cards. You become aware, in a way you weren’t before, that there is something at stake, even if you can’t quite define what it is. You slow down. You notice each card. You begin to feel the edges of possibility pressing in on the moment. It is, in its own small way, a kind of theatre. Then, right at the back, almost as if it had been placed there deliberately, it appeared. A Mega Gengar EX SIR. The card. The one you hear about. The one that sits somewhere between myth and market. An £800 card, pulled from a £4 pack. For a moment, it didn’t quite make sense. The numbers didn’t seem to belong to the object in my hand. It was just cardboard, printed ink, something that had cost, at most, a few pennies to produce. And yet, there it was, carrying a value that far exceeded anything materially present.
The instinct, almost immediately, is to ask how that can be true. How something so simple, so easily replicated, so materially insignificant, can hold that kind of value because this isn’t a story about cost of production or labour or utility. The card does not do anything that justifies £800. It doesn’t generate income, it doesn’t solve a problem, it doesn’t even materially improve the experience of the game in a way that would warrant such a price. Its value comes from somewhere else entirely, somewhere less tangible but no less real.
Part of it is scarcity, of course. That specific version of the card exists in very limited numbers, and the probability of finding one in a pack is extremely low. Scarcity on its own, however, doesn’t create value. There are countless rare things in the world that nobody is willing to pay for. What matters is that scarcity intersects with desire, and that desire is not individual but collective. Thousands of people, independently but also together, have decided that this card is worth having. Not just worth having, but worth pursuing, worth talking about, worth assigning significance to. That shared agreement is what gives the card its weight. Not the object itself, but the network of belief that surrounds it.
Then there is the structure that makes that belief possible. When you buy a pack of Pokémon cards, you are not really buying the cards themselves, at least not in the way you might think. You are buying the possibility that something extraordinary might happen. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Most of the time, the outcome is entirely ordinary, predictable, almost forgettable. But occasionally, just often enough to sustain the system, something breaks through. And when it does, it doesn’t just create value, it creates a story. A moment that feels disproportionate to its cause, but entirely justified in its impact. The £800 card is not just a piece of cardboard, it is the visible expression of that moment, the point at which probability, anticipation and chance converge.
It would be easy, at this point, to say that this is capitalism in its purest form. A system where value is not determined by cost, but by what someone else is willing to pay. Where markets, rather than materials, define worth. In one sense, that is true. The card is worth £800 because someone, somewhere, is willing to exchange £800 for it. That is the entire mechanism, but this is also a very particular version of capitalism, one that leans heavily on speculation, on scarcity, on the amplification of desire within a community that shares the same frame of reference. It is closer to art markets, to collectibles, to spaces where meaning is constructed and reinforced, than it is to the everyday economy of goods and services.
What makes it interesting, though, is not just that this kind of value can exist, but how easily we accept it. There is no real resistance to the idea that a rare Pokémon card might be worth £800. It feels surprising, perhaps even amusing, but not fundamentally unjust. We understand, intuitively, how the system has arrived there. We accept the logic of rarity, of demand, of shared narrative. Yet, in other parts of the economy which are far far more important than a small piece of printed card, we struggle to recognise value even when it is far more substantive, far more consequential, far more real.
At the same time as we can collectively agree that a piece of cardboard is worth £800, there are people with skills, with ideas, with businesses they are trying to build, who are valued at effectively zero by the financial system. Not because they lack capability, but because their lives do not fit the models that are used to assess risk and worth. Their income has been irregular. Their circumstances have been disrupted. Their story doesn’t align neatly with the assumptions built into mainstream finance and so the system, unable to process them, assigns them no value at all.
At Purple Shoots, this is where the work begins. With the recognition that value exists long before it is formally acknowledged, that potential is often invisible not because it isn’t there, but because the system isn’t designed to see it. The difference between something being worth £800 and something being worth nothing is not always rooted in substance. Sometimes, it is rooted in whether there is a structure capable of recognising and supporting it.
This, perhaps, is the deeper parallel hidden inside a £4 pack of Pokémon cards. The moment of opening it, the hesitation, the quiet sense that something extraordinary might be there, is not irrational. It is human. We are drawn to the possibility that what appears ordinary might, under the right conditions, reveal itself as something of value. That hidden potential might exist, waiting to be uncovered. Sometimes, that potential takes the form of a rare card, briefly surfacing in a system designed to produce exactly that kind of moment.
The more interesting question is what happens outside that system. What happens in the places where potential exists, but the mechanisms to reveal and support it do not. Because the real anomaly is not that a piece of cardboard can be worth £800. It is that so much human potential is still priced at zero, simply because we have not built the structures capable of recognising its value.