Pokémon fans beg for shocking limits after awful Pitch Black presale

Polygon RSS Feed✍ Patricia Hernandez📅 June 11, 2026⏱ 4 min read(3 months ago)

Overview & Key Takeaways

The Pokémon Center's new Pitch Black drop left many Pokémon trading card game fans angry and confused, and with no cards to show for it.

If you managed to get the Pokémon Trading Card Game Pitch Black pre-orders from The Pokémon Center on Wednesday, there are two possibilities. Either luck was on your side, or you're using a bot. At least, this is the assumption many upset Pokémon fans are making after fruitlessly spending hours staring at a Psyduck on the Pokémon Center's website. The experience of trying to purchase new Pokémon cards has become so awful, fans are calling for extreme measures.

The new card set, which comes out on July 17, is proving to be a hot commodity. Fans who popped into the pre-order queue less than 15 minutes before launch often faced wait times up to nine hours long, based on stories shared on popular Pokémon drop Discord servers. The wait was made worse by the site's random crashes and refreshes. After making progress in the queue, many fans found themselves booted to the very end of the line.

If fans managed to get past that, the challenge had only begun. Navigating the website was nearly impossible, as was placing anything in the cart. If the website somehow registered items added to the bag, checking out was still likely to fail.

Two of the most likely Pokemon cards to be fake, according to PSA. One is a Charizard card and the other is a Gengar card. Graphic: Polygon | Source images: The Pokémon Company

The most common problems users faced involved freezes and timeouts, so reloading was an inevitability. The Pokémon Center has aggressive anti-bot measures that result in swift bans, so even something as simple as using autofill in a web browser could get fans blocked from the site. But many Pokémon fans say they have no idea why they were banned.

"I got a text an hour after the queue and was already blocked lmao," one Redditor said in a thread with 2,500 upvotes, in reference to the alert blasts sent out by The Pokémon Company.

"My browser stopped receiving a response from the website after about 45 minutes so took the page 'offline'," another remarked. "When I went to engage with it, it refreshed. Then I received notice that I was a bot."

Hardcore fans went in knowing that the Pokémon Center's systems were sensitive, and advised each other to type and click things slowly. The approach didn't matter, though. If you were slow, the website could crash. If you were fast, the system could ban you. The Pokémon Center website appeared to even punish fans who were early, apparently interpreting it as good timing that only a bot could achieve.

The Pokémon Company has tried addressing its issue with trading card game scalpers in a number of ways. Print production has grown exponentially; last year alone, The Pokémon Company created billions of cards. A new card facility is expected to open sometime in 2027, as well. The company encourages fans to sign up for its newsletter for private sales invites, or for early sales alerts. So far, TPC hasn't made good on its promises.

Since nothing has worked thus far, fans are starting to call for a different type of solution. In Japan, the fervor around card drops has led to ID requirements for purchases at official Pokémon stores. In the past, similar security measures have proven unpopular with gamers who value their privacy. But after a year of increasingly difficult drops, Pokémon card fans are at their wits' end.

"If PKC gave a fuck they would just do ID verification and require an account," one Pokémon fan wrote on a popular drop Discord.

One fan on Facebook asked their community, "All in favor of ID verification for Pokémon Center Purchases?" The replies were largely positive. Even the initial report about ID requirements was met with calls to bring the system worldwide.

Whatever The Pokémon Company decides, fans hope that a solution will arrive soon. Excitement around the 30th anniversary Pokémon set that will include popular card reprints and features beloved artists is sky high. If most people can't buy anything and are stuck paying even higher scalper prices for special cards, the community meltdown will be nuclear.

There are reportedly new purchase policies for Pokémon merch

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