Well, that was completely ridiculous.

I've been collecting cards since long before queues outside Smyths at 5am were considered a perfectly normal way to spend release morning. I've seen the hobby quiet, I've seen it busy, and I've lived through the Covid boom, the Logan Paul effect, scalpers, investors, breakers, grading crazes and more Charizard products than I could possibly count. But the release of Pokémon's 30th Celebration set last week was something else entirely.

If you weren't following it, picture grown adults camping overnight outside toy shops, hundreds of people queueing before sunrise, websites selling out almost instantly and people driving from shop to shop desperately looking for stock. Reuters footage from release morning showed exactly that sort of scene, with fans camping outside Smyths and products reportedly selling out within minutes.

For those of us who were collecting before the current hype, it's difficult to decide whether it's brilliant, completely mad, or actually a little bit sad. It's probably a mixture of all three.

Remember when you could just buy Pokémon cards?

This is the part newer collectors might find difficult to believe. There was a time when buying the latest Pokémon set involved walking into a shop, seeing some packs on a shelf and buying them. That was pretty much it.

There were no Discord stock alerts, twelve browser tabs open at once, virtual queues or discussions about whether getting out of bed at 4am would be early enough. You certainly didn't need to own a camping chair.

For most of the hobby's history, there wasn't this constant feeling that if you didn't buy something immediately, somebody else would get it and you'd either miss out completely or have to pay twice the price tomorrow. That's probably the biggest change I've noticed as a long-term collector.

The cards have always been collectable, there have always been expensive cards and there have always been people buying and selling them, but somewhere along the way collecting Pokémon became an event. On 16 September, we saw perhaps the ultimate version of it.

Reuters footage from Crawley shows people already queueing outside Smyths at 4:30 in the morning. The same location was filmed again at 8am and shortly after the store opened at 9am.

In Gloucester, some collectors apparently decided even that wasn't early enough. BBC reporting carried by Yahoo News found collector Dan Spragg and his friends had arrived outside Smyths at around 7pm the evening before, ready for the shop opening at 9am the following morning.

That's fourteen hours waiting outside a toy shop to buy Pokémon cards.

Reports came in from across the country of people arriving at 4am, 5am and 6am. Blankets and camping chairs appeared and breakfasts were packed. Further footage from Crawley even shows a tent pitched outside Smyths, with one collector reporting that he was already 45th in the queue.

At this point we're somewhere between a card release and Glastonbury, except at the end of this particular queue you don't get to see a headline act; you get an Elite Trainer Box, hopefully.

109th in the queue at 7am

One of my favourite, or perhaps most depressing, stories from release day came directly from a UK collector.

In a release-day discussion on the Pokémon TCG UK subreddit, the collector reported arriving at their local Smyths at around 7am and already being 109th in the queue.

According to their account, Smyths staff told them the store had around 160 ETBs and a similar or smaller quantity of the other products, with tickets being handed out to those waiting.

The replies give a brilliant snapshot of what was happening elsewhere. Another collector said they'd arrived at 5:30am and were roughly 100th in their queue. Someone else reported arriving at 7am and estimated they were about 250th, while a parent queueing at The Entertainer in Westfield London said they were number 32 at 8:30am but still missed out on an ETB for their son's birthday.

These are individual collector accounts rather than independently verified figures, but taken together they give you a pretty good idea of what release morning felt like.

That's where I think the current state of the hobby becomes difficult.

Collectors, scalpers and investors

I don't particularly like throwing the word "scalper" at everyone who buys more than one box. It's become far too easy.

Someone buys two ETBs and they're a scalper. Someone keeps a sealed collection and they're an investor. Someone sells a card and they're a flipper. Someone owns more product than you and they're definitely a scalper.

The reality is obviously more complicated. I've bought and sold cards for years and that's part of collecting. Most long-term collectors have sold things to fund other purchases at some point.

There is, however, clearly a difference between that and clearing shelves because you know the person standing behind you will pay double the price an hour later.

The frustration was very visible online. Nintendo Life's coverage of the UK launch collected several X posts from release morning showing huge queues and collectors complaining about stock disappearing almost immediately.

Serebii's Joe Merrick was among those posting about the online experience after stock disappeared while he was checking out shortly after 5am. His wonderfully understated conclusion was simply: "This is fine."

Anyone who has tried buying a hyped Pokémon release online in recent years knows the feeling. You add something to your basket, head to checkout, watch the page load for an eternity and are then politely informed that the product you thought you'd bought no longer exists.

£250,000 in two hours

If you want a single statistic that demonstrates just how enormous Pokémon currently is in the UK, this might be it.

According to figures released by Menkind and reported by Total Licensing, the retailer generated more than £250,000 in Pokémon anniversary sales during its first two hours of trading.

Some Menkind locations reportedly recorded first-hour takings up to twenty times their normal level, while customers at some locations were arriving as early as 5am. The retailer also said Pokémon TCG products were among the products leading demand.

For those of us who remember periods when the Pokémon TCG section of a shop consisted of a few lonely theme decks and boosters hanging from a peg, numbers like that are almost difficult to comprehend.

Perhaps that's why this release feels so strange. We spent years wanting more people to appreciate the hobby and now an enormous number of people do.

Be careful what you wish for.

And then somehow Stacey Solomon entered the story

There is a sentence I never expected to write on benscards: the Pokémon release became so ridiculous that Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash ended up in the middle of a controversy about Pokémon card allocations.

The pair attended the release at Geek Retreat in Chelmsford with their family, after which accusations appeared on X claiming they'd been given preferential treatment, skipped the queue and bought excessive amounts of stock.

There is an important distinction here because the allegations were strongly denied by both Stacey Solomon and Geek Retreat.

Solomon said her family joined the queue like everyone else and were subject to the same purchase limits. Geek Retreat subsequently said they weren't allowed in early, weren't given extra stock and were subject to the same limits as everyone else. The store said they happened to be second in the queue when it opened.

Solomon also said she'd already tried Waterstones that morning and failed to get anything, while her son had been queueing at Smyths in Romford from 7am and also missed out.

Celebrity or not, Pokémon release day apparently doesn't care.

The fact we're even discussing a celebrity queueing controversy over Pokémon cards tells you almost everything you need to know about how big this release became.

I do understand the hype

Despite everything I've just written, I get it. Pokémon turning 30 is a big deal.

For collectors of my generation, Pokémon isn't simply another trading card game. These cards were part of our childhood. I can still remember the excitement of opening packs when I was younger, when we didn't know population reports, recent sold prices or what a PSA 10 copy was worth. You wanted the shiny, and that was basically the investment strategy. Pull Charizard and it was a good day; pull another Beedrill and it was considerably less exciting.

Thirty years later, some of the people who opened those original packs now have children of their own who are opening Pokémon cards. Interestingly, that same generational aspect cropped up in the BBC's reporting from Gloucester, where one woman said she was buying the cards for her partner and daughter because collecting was something they did together.

That's quite special, and I suspect nostalgia explains a huge amount of what we're seeing.

Don't panic if you missed out

This is probably the most important thing I'd say to anyone who missed out on release day: don't panic and don't let FOMO make the decision for you.

We've seen this before. A product launches, stock disappears, social media goes mad, prices shoot up and everyone suddenly convinces themselves they'll never see one at retail again. Sometimes products genuinely do remain difficult to find, but release day isn't necessarily the time to make that judgement.

There are also already signs that launch-day stock wasn't the end of the story. Menkind, for example, said it was expecting significant stock replenishments over the following weeks.

If your choice is between waiting or paying somebody an enormous premium simply because they managed to stand outside Smyths earlier than you did, I'd certainly consider waiting.

FOMO can be very expensive in this hobby.

Is all this hype actually good for Pokémon?

That's the question I've been thinking about since release day, and I genuinely don't know.

Part of me loves seeing Pokémon this popular. This hobby has given me an enormous amount of enjoyment over the years and seeing another generation discover it is fantastic. Seeing parents collecting with their children is fantastic, as is seeing people who sold their childhood collections twenty years ago suddenly remember why they loved the cards in the first place.

But I miss something about the old hobby too.

I miss being able to walk into a shop and buy packs without having a strategy.

Maybe that's simply what happens when something you love becomes enormously popular. You can't have millions of new people entering a hobby and expect it to remain exactly the same.

The 30th Anniversary release has certainly been complete mayhem. We've had queues, tents, sell-outs, scalper arguments, checkout meltdowns and, somehow, a Stacey Solomon controversy, with plenty more anniversary excitement still to come.

Underneath all that noise, though, there are still people opening packs because they love Pokémon. There are collectors trying to finish sets, parents handing their kids their first cards and those few seconds after opening a booster, when you're slowly moving through the cards towards the rare, where you're suddenly a kid again.

That's the part of the hobby I hope we never lose.

Happy 30th, Pokémon. Absolute chaos, but I wouldn't have expected anything less.