Yahoo! Auctions and Yahoo! Flea Market, two of Japan's largest resale platforms, stopped accepting carton listings of Pokémon cards on 13 October. Operator LINE Yahoo drew up the rules together with The Pokémon Company, Famitsu reports, and they took effect on the day they were announced.
Three kinds of listing are now banned. Sealed cartons, the wholesale cases that hold several booster boxes, can no longer be sold. Empty boxes and empty packs are off the platforms as well; according to Inside Games, that rule covers every trading card game, not only Pokémon, because opened boxes have been refilled and resold as sealed. The third rule targets large numbers of the same product listed within a set period after release. It starts with the Japanese 30th CELEBRATION set, but neither company has said how many listings count as "large" or how long the window lasts.
Single cards are not affected. Dexerto points out that individual cards and other products can still be listed as long as they follow platform rules, so this is a brake on bulk flipping rather than a resale ban. The Pokémon Company will also share more information with LINE Yahoo about products and distribution channels that could lead to problem trades.
Yahoo is the second big Japanese marketplace to act around the anniversary set. In September, Mercari blocked listings of sealed 30th Celebration products from release day onward. Comparable rules outside Japan do not exist so far.