Tyler (right) and his friend George, both six of Scituate, Mass., hold up their favorite Pokemon trading cards on Sept. 9, 1999. Associated Press file photo

When I was a kid growing up in the late ’90s, I was big into a hobby that was far from unpopular at the time — collecting cards from the Pokemon trading card game. I was never very into playing the actual card game, and while my little plastic box of rare cards that I had kept has long since vanished from this reality, I still have plenty of fond memories.

It was the wild west in those days, where playgrounds would become underground trading dens for little pieces of cardboard with holographic art.

Who would have ever guessed that some of those cards — like the classic holographic Charizard from the Pokemon TCG’s first base set — would be worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in some instances?

It was hard to imagine in 2003 and 2004, when the first wave of “Poke-mania” ended and the franchise as a whole found its way back down into relative obscurity.

Sure, things still continued on, obviously — Pokemon is the highest-grossing media franchise on Earth.

But things took a turn in 2016 — the year the franchise celebrated its 20th anniversary. With the release of the mobile game, “Pokemon Go,” Pokemon rejoined the cultural zeitgeist with a vengeance.

Seemingly overnight, Pokemon was the cool thing to do again — playing Go, the other video games and even the trading card game made a resurgence, thanks in no small part to internet influencers purchasing extremely rare cards. Logan Paul and his Charizard on a gold chain comes to mind.

It led to the game coming back in popularity the likes of which we haven’t seen since those early days in 1999 and 2000.

Not only are vintage packs and cards valued quite highly in today’s market, but modern packs are also becoming incredibly difficult to find without breaking the bank.

An unopened box of the revised, unlimited Base Set on tcgplayer.com is running for $30,000 as of writing. I don’t think I really need to state this…but I’m not spending that on trading cards. I will, however, take the time to buy individual cards, which is far and away the cheaper option, and because of that willingness, I’ve again developed an itch to go chasing down Pokemon cards.

I visited the SGC Hobby store in Altoona recently to purchase a box of one of the newest sets, “Destined Rivals,” and grab a few other things like sleeves and a binder for my Yu-Gi-Oh! collection that I have been working to preserve before I move back into Pokemon.

My goal is to collect master sets (one of each card) for Base Set, the Fossil and Jungle expansions, Base Set 2, the Legendary Collection (Base set 3), Team Rocket, Gym Heroes, Gym Challenge, Neo Genesis, Neo Discovery, Neo Revelations and Neo Destiny. In total, I’m looking at about 1,250 total cards.

As the gentleman who helped me at the game shop that day put it after I explained, “You could not have picked a worse time to try and get back into this.”

And he’s not wrong — prices on some of the cards I would need to seek out like Charizard, Mewtwo and others, are already expensive now, and this is a project that will take years, not months, to complete these sets. And that’s not even talking about the fact that modern sets have crept up in price over the years, partly due to the increased demand and partly because of recent tariffs, but mostly because of product scalpers.

I also visited the Altoona Target and Walmart stores this week in search of some of the “Scarlet & Violet: 151” packs. They were not long visits.

While there were plenty of options for the other games being carried — Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic, One Piece among others — the shelves that had once contained Pokemon cards were just … empty. Like a goblin had come in the night and walked away with everything, which, truth be told, likely wasn’t too far from accurate.

A friend suggested checking under the shelves there, which I did not do and will do the next time I visit some of those places.

But it all really makes me wish I hadn’t lost all of my old cards.

Mirror copy editor Dan Isenberg can be reached at disenberg@altoonamirror.com or on X @TheseDanTweets.