>I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after Logan Paul paid $5 million for a rare card in 2021.

the cards have been popular for significantly longer than 5 years.

my kid's entire class (the entire school, really) brought their binders of pokemon cards to school every day in ~2002 until the school banned pokemon cards on premise because they were such a distraction and causing issues (kids crying about unfair trades, etc.)

They have long been popular, but the popularity has increased more than 5x since the pandemic. They were printing less than 2 billion a year before then [1], and are now selling more than 10 billion a year despite shortages, scalping, etc [2].

Perhaps "boom" is a better word for it than "fad". But my point is just that this demand seems to be largely driven by artifical scarcity, speculation, influencers - similar to Labubu.

And eventually prices will hit a peak and I expect we will see demand fall off rapidly.

[1] https://www.pokebeach.com/2021/06/pokemon-tcg-sold-3-7-billi...

[2] https://www.ign.com/articles/10-billion-pokemon-cards-were-p...

Their popularity is a fad. You are talking about their popularity when they first released in the US. They faded significantly for at least a decade if not two until seeing a recent resurgence so massive even random corner stores carry pokemon card packs these days.