It started at the kitchen table. He got back into Pokemon because his daughters were into it, and one pack turned into a weekend ritual. They would rip a few together, groan at the bad pulls, lose their minds over a holo, and tape the good ones to the fridge like report cards. It was never about the cards being worth something. It was about the ten minutes where both his girls are leaning over the table waiting to see what is under the foil.
Somewhere in there the collection outgrew the shelf. Doubles piled up, boxes stacked in the closet, and the hobby started costing more than a dad with two daughters wants to admit. So he did the obvious thing and started selling the extras to fund the next box instead of eating the cost. That was the whole plan. Sell a few doubles, keep the kids in cards, break even if he was lucky.
He is not a store and not a hustle. He is a guy who tracks what things actually sell for and prices them right there, no games. No fifty dollar markup because a card got hot on TikTok last night, no waiting for a panic buyer, no squeezing a kid for the last few bucks.
The part that got under his skin was watching scalpers clean out the shelves the morning a set dropped, then flip the same packs at triple to the kids who had been saving for weeks. A ten year old with allowance money should not be bidding against a reseller running a checkout bot. That is the moment it stopped being about doubles and started being about the hobby. He decided he was not going to run his table that way, and he started calling out the gougers and the good sellers alike, right there on camera where everyone could see it.