Just yesterday we brought you news about a literal parking lot shooting between two grown adults fighting over Pokémon cards. A day later, via IGN, we’ve now got footage of a crowd of between 30 and 40 people descending into utter chaos as they lined up to buy a restock of Prismatic Evolution cards from a Costco. We’re talking drinks thrown, cards ruined, and a car being driven into a shopping cart.
Uploaded to Instagram on April 11 by Pokéstreetz, the video contains bizarre scenes of a large group in a Costco parking lot waiting to buy cards from Pokémon TCG set Prismatic Evolutions—the special collection that really set off the current scalping mayhem when it was originally released in January 2025. Cards from Prismatic Evolution are incredibly highly sought after, and new product is vanishingly rare, with anything that does get put out usually scooped up by scalpers before regular customers can get their hands on it. Hence the crowd of people hoping to buy the cards when Costco got new stock.
But as the footage shows, things became completely out of control once people emerged from the store with the products in hand. The clips begin with what appear to be boxes of Pokémon packs strewn on the ground, with seeming violence as people try to pick them up and put them in bags. This apparently occurred after one man tried to fill a shopping cart with boxes of the set, an eyewitness telling Pokéstreetz that others responded by throwing cups off coffee over the cart before a car drove into it, spilling the boxes over the ground.
The police, who were already on scene, then chased after this car with lights flashing, and apparently caught the driver.
It seems Costcos around North America have somehow managed to receive a number of large shipments of Prismatic Evolution, which will be all the more galling for the independent card stores that have supported The Pokémon Company for the last 30 years who now can get little or no stock at all from the corporation, while big box stores reap the benefits of the current bubble.