PokemonCenter actually did something right. A rare W for the Pokémon TCG community.

For the first time in I don’t even know how long, PokémonCenter actually did something right. No, seriously. Stop what you’re doing. This isn’t your typical “bot infested disaster drop.” We’ve got a real, genuine win for collectors, fans, and anyone who’s sick of being treated like an afterthought when it comes to product releases.

The Prismatic Evolutions Elite Trainer Box drop was a joke.

What a disaster. Bots absolutely obliterated the entire thing. It was like watching a group of vultures swoop down on a carcass, but the carcass was our hopes of getting one of those boxes. The site? Yeah, it crashed. Surprise, surprise. Nobody could get in, and the second it came back up, it was already too late.

The whole thing was like a bad joke, and the punchline was that the only ones who walked away with the goods were the ones with the bots in their corner.

The Journey Together Elite Trainer Box drop was a W.

So normally, if you blink, the whole pre-order is snatched up by bots faster than you can say “scalper.” But PokémonCenter, the gods of TCG, decided to actually try something different this time: a real queue system.

Why This Matters?

PokémonCenter opened up a pre-order where actual human beings got a shot. You heard that right. More people got to buy the damn thing than ever before. Imagine that. More people buying products at a fair price. It’s like a breath of fresh air in a world filled with predatory bots and scalpers trying to suck every last penny out of the community.

THIS is how it should be.

The old system was an absolute joke. Bots would swoop in like vultures before I could even find the “Add to Cart” button. It was like waiting in line at WalMart and watching some dude with 17 TVs in his cart walk past you like you’re invisible.

But this time, you got a fair shot to actually buy something. No more bots eating up everything in milliseconds. No more staring at your screen. You had time. You could actually try to get what you wanted.

That’s a huge deal.

Why are people hating on this?

There are still some naysayers out there saying “this doesn’t solve everything,” blah blah blah. Yeah, no kidding. But this is a step in the right direction. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but this could be the beginning of the end of bot-dominated product drops. I’ll take it.

The “too perfect” crowd will always complain. The ones who hate seeing a community win. The ones who think every change should be perfect or it’s worthless. These are the same people who cry about change, but they’ve been part of the problem this whole time. Some of the loudest voices complaining are the ones who’ve been scalping the hardest. Funny how that works.

This Is the future we deserve.

PokémonCenter did something we rarely see in the corporate world: they cared about the community. The fans. The ones who are actually invested, not the ones buying up stock to resell for 2X. We might be seeing a shift here. It’s not perfect, but it’s a win.

You might be saying, “But bots will always find a way.” And they probably will. But that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and quit trying. The fact that PokémonCenter even listened means there’s hope. If we keep pushing, if we keep showing that the community wants fair access, eventually we’ll get to a place where bots and scalpers don’t have the upper hand. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday.

More people got to order the Journey Together Elite Trainer Boxes than ever before. That’s a win for the community. Period. And if you can’t see that, you’re missing the bigger picture.

This isn’t the end of the road, but it’s a damn good start.