Why is this allowed?

>>26472706
If you're playing pokémon for money then you're doing something wrong.

>>26472706
Building a winning deck and keeping up with the meta is significantly more expensive than buying a game

>>26472706
It's called prize support. If you think this is too much then don't even look at YGO or Magic's prize support.

>>26472755
This desu senpai

>>26472755
Like how much more? I know nothing about TCG.

Don't know whether you are complaining about winning Pokemon gets you money or why TCG gives more prizes than VGC. The latter should be obvious.

>>26472763
also I'm pretty sure pokemon's prizes are meant to be used for stuff like college

when I was participating in nats back in 2010~2012 they even said the prizes were college scholarships worth around as much as the image is showing

so its not all that insane

>>26472804
They still are -- players 18 and up can receive either cash or a scholarship (both with the same value), and players under 18 either get a scholarship or a "travel certificate"

>>26472774
Competitive cards like Shaymin-EX can cost an upward of $40 a piece and you often need 4 in your deck. Unlike video games the card value doesn't go down if you try to buy them in used condition (unless they're really badly beaten up). A new TCG expansion comes out once every 3 months and you need to be up to date all the time to test out new strategies. Even though Pokemon is still arguably the cheapest popular TCG around shit can get costly very quickly.

I should also add that the luck aspect is less prominent in TCG than in the video games so the matches are probably percived as more competitive (and thus more worthy of a reward).