Poké Court is quiet on the Tuesday afternoon I visit. Customers at the Manhattan card shop browse binders of Pokémon, most of the cards priced between $1 and $5. A group of people at the counter open a booster pack, a random selection of ten cards, and celebrate after pulling a Misty’s Psyduck worth around $45. The only real sign that the place had just been robbed was the police car stationed outside.

It has been about a week since the shop, a 2,000-square-foot flagship that opened on West 13th Street last November, was hit by three armed, masked men who ransacked a case of rare cards while holding more than 50 employees and customers at gunpoint. The whole thing took three minutes. No one was hurt, but more than $120,000 worth of merchandise was stolen plus whatever else was grabbed from the register. The details feel dissonant. It’s a Pokémon store that looks like a pretend subway station. The people there that day were bedazzling top loaders — display cases for their favorite cards. “It’s a hobby that’s not the caliber of a jewelry store or bank,” Courtney Chin, who owns Poké Court, told me. ”Until now.”

On the day of the robbery, the auction for Logan Paul’s Pikachu Illustrator card reached $5.1 million, with a month of bids left to go. But even downstream of a potentially record-setting card, the Pokémon trading-card market has become unrecognizable in the last few years. The trading cards were first developed in Japan in 1996 and had early international success as a lunch-hour activity for elementary-school kids. But interest ballooned, with early, rarer cards attracting particular fervor. Today, the market has evolved into something like a mutant combination of art collecting and the stock market. You can try your luck with a booster pack and hope to pull a high-value card or pay for single cards........

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