The value of Pokémon cards is clearly imaginary. Even in their initial, commodified form, a slip of mass-produced, coloured cardboard is by no stretch of the imagination “worth” the money children wish to pay for them. Within most economistic analyzes, and many Marxist ones, it would simply be assumed that the “use-value” of the cards is worth the extra price, and that this “use” is basically enjoyment or distraction (whether interpreted positively or negatively). But the “use-value” of the cards is really the way they serve as a medium for the negotiation of value, which is highly imaginative, remarkably collaborative (if sometimes coercive) and largely autonomous. However, it is an imagination, collaboration and autonomy achieved through and predicated on access to the Pokémon card commodity. And that commodity carries with it its own logic and constraints. While it is possible that children might make radically different use of Pokémon cards than the basic theme of collection/battle/nurture/train/accumulate, these tendencies repeat in children’s play with Pokémon cards through a combination of the cards’ own material logic (they are highly collectable and suggest themselves for these purposes) and intertextual reinforcement, not only from other Pokémon media (films, comic books, etc.) but from a whole society in which values of acquisition, competitiveness, accumulation and hierarchy are privileged in uncountable subtle ways. So, while children may exercise their agency and imagination in their play with Pokémon cards, and while they may use them to negotiate their own social values and reproduce (and transform) their social circles, they do so in conditions not of their own choosing.