Pokémon 30th Anniversary Cards Are Sparking Fights, Knife Threats, and Arrests Outside Stores

The launch of the Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration set last Wednesday has triggered a wave of chaotic scenes at retail stores across the US, with footage of fights, a knife being pulled, and at least one arrest circulating widely online. Instagram account Pokestreetz has been curating the clips, giving a running record of just how badly things are going at store openings.

At a Target in Northridge, California, staff tried to manage the crowd by making people wait in the parking lot and then shouting "GO!" to let them sprint toward the entrance. Predictably, adults shoved kids against the wall in the scramble. In Gilroy, California, the situation escalated far more seriously — people camped overnight outside a Target in tents and folding chairs, and when accusations of line-jumping surfaced, a knife was allegedly pulled and punches were thrown before police sirens broke things up. In South Carolina, a man who cut in line and refused to leave when asked by store management was handcuffed by police — and reportedly drove straight to a Best Buy to queue up there afterward. In Conroe, Texas, a woman was caught on camera screaming about someone sitting in her chair for eight hours, a consequence of the growing "ghost chair" trend, where overnight campers leave empty folding chairs to hold their spot while they dash to other stores to buy more product.

The Pokémon TCG has had a scalping problem for years, peaking during the pandemic-era card boom when sealed product was flipped for massive markups and stores started limiting purchases or moving cards behind counters entirely. The 30th Celebration set was widely expected to follow the same pattern, but early data suggests pull rates are generous enough and resale prices low enough that scalpers are not seeing the returns they anticipated — which makes the chaos even more absurd. People are camping overnight and getting into knife fights over cards that the secondary market is already struggling to move at a premium.

Despite the poor scalping economics, the crowds are not thinning and stores are still scrambling to find crowd-control methods that actually work. With no consistent national retail policy in place, individual branches are improvising — and as the Northridge parking-lot sprint demonstrates, improvisation is not going well.