Yesterday, The Pokemon Company announced its latest trading card game expansion, Phantasmal Flames. After weeks of rumors, the set was confirmed to feature Mega Charizard and Mega Gengar, two of the series' most popular Pokemon. Naturally, this means the set is going to be incredibly popular among collectors — and those looking to make a quick buck from them.

With the current state of the Pokemon Trading Card Game, where genuine fans are losing out on products to scalpers and botting services, anxiety is always high around a new release, especially one that is going to be as sought after as this.

Those fears were quickly proven true yesterday as, reportedly, 42,000 Phantasmal Flames products were purchased from The Pokemon Center website before they went live. Thankfully, The Pokemon Company is doing something about it.

Pokemon Company Is In The Process Of Canceling 42,000 Phantasmal Flames TCG Orders

With the value of Charizard cards and the popularity of Gengar, there was always going to be a race for Phantasmal Flames. Especially given that the expansion will include a brand-new Mega Charizard X Ultra Premium Collection.

As is often the case now, on the day The Pokemon Company announces a new expansion, the products are added to The Pokemon Center website, and consumers are given the opportunity to purchase them (provided they can beat the queues). This happened yesterday, at least to an extent.

The Phantasmal Flames products were added to The Pokemon Center back-end, but before they could be pushed live for prospective buyers, they were scooped up by bots, with one service claiming over 42,000 items were checked out. Unexpectedly, they never went live for the regular consumer.

News then began to circulate around Pokemon TCG communities, with fears exacerbated that everybody had missed the drop. Thankfully, that's not the case.

Within a couple of hours of botting services flexing their big "win", new reports came in that The Pokemon Center was canceling these illegitimate orders, and the scalpers weren't happy.

But while scalpers weren't happy, it's a massive win for the Pokemon community. In an unprecedented era, where it's seemingly impossible to get packs, it's good to see Pokemon doing something about it. You have to imagine that the actual drop will be at some point today, so make sure you have The Pokemon Center website ready to go.

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Pokemon TCG

Franchise Pokemon Original Release Date October 20, 1996 Player Count 2 Age Recommendation 6+ Length per Game Variable Franchise Name Pokemon Expand Collapse