THE FUSE

For over a year, buying booster packs of Pokémon cards on the official Pokémon Center website has required either the most extraordinary luck, or a bot. When new stock is added to the site, it very quickly collapses under the weight of incoming traffic, leading to error messages or queues that never resolve. Any who do manage to get in before the site goes down are limited by strict purchase restrictions, except of course for those running the bots that are able to scoop up the stock in milliseconds. So was today’s peculiar decision to bundle the enormously popular Surging Sparks booster boxes with the never-wanted and very bulky Pokémon Academy boxes a deliberate troll of the scalpers by The Pokémon Company?