All Language species Collectors shoutout!

[Quuador]

I’ve been collecting Pikachu in all languages for the first 25 years of the Pokémon (up to Feb. 27th, 2021) and have been collecting Pikachu for roughly 9 years now, and Seviper in all languages as well for about 6.5 years.

Since I started collecting Seviper a few years after I was already collecting Pikachu, it wasn’t too hard in general. I knew where to find most English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish cards (so to CardMarket I went), and although some took some time to emerge on CardMarket, in about a year I had all of those. Japanese wasn’t too hard either, except for two unlimited edition WCP cards - which took me ~3.5 year to find and were the last two cards I needed at the time to 100% complete my Seviper TCG collection.
For (Brazilian) Portuguese I had quite some issues the first ~4 years of collecting. It wasn’t until I found an amazing Brazilian middleman (iirc he actually contacted me after he saw my Pikachu collection video on YT. ), who helped me get from ~25% of Portuguese cards for both collections, to 100% for Seviper and 99% for Pikachu, which he all found locally within two weeks. Only the 1st edition Jungle Pikachu he wasn’t able to find, which I later pulled from three booster packs I bought myself. And he had been helping me with new releases since.
For Seviper, these days it’s mostly the non-Japanese Asian languages (Korean, T. Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, S. Chinesse) which give some trouble. Luckily, I still have an active Indonesian middleman, as well as a friend from Singapore and a Chinese guy currently living in the US, who help me with the Korean, T. Chinese, and S. Chinese cards. Only the Thai cards are a bit more troubling lately, but luckily they do end up as singles on eBay or OjamaCard eventually with time, in my experience. So my Seviper collection is re-completed again. There are still two SwSh and SV era artworks that might release in Simplified Chinese perhaps, but apart from that it’s waiting for a new artwork to release, and I’m therefore mostly focusing on the non-TCG Seviper portion.

Pikachu on the other hand is a much different story. Especially since it not only has cards in all 15 available TCG languages, but there are just so, so many and it’s very hard to keep up with new releases, both in terms of time-consumption and financially (e.g. in 2019 a total of 233 Pikachu TCG cards were released). Which is also why I limited myself to the first 25 years, and stopped collecting all languages for cards released after February 27th, 2021 (with some exceptions), since it just wasn’t fun anymore.

But Pikachu also has not just language-exclusive artworks and cards, but even a lot of country-exclusive releases. There are English Pikachu cards exclusively released in these respective countries: Sweden; The Netherlands; Canada; the UK; the US; Singapore/Malaysia/Philippines/HK; there are French Pikachu cards exclusive released in Canada and/or Belgium; Spanish cards exclusive to Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and/or Chile; there is an error release where the English and German releases were correctly released in their respective countries, but the French and Italian releases had one of the four languages at random in the product (I’ve ended up buying my French copy from an Italian seller and vice-versa More than a year after they were released…).

Still, the journey and collecting itself is a lot of fun, as well as the friends and fellow collectors you meet along the way. And when you do eventually find those hard to find cards, it is an amazing feeling, and also fun to look back on years later. To give some examples by quoting myself from my collection thread, of cards I was able to add to my collection years after searching for them:

Apr. 2017: Japanese 102/DP-P Pikachu (rare Japanese Pikachu card at the time)

@Quuador

A very special addition again, which arrived today:

The 102/DP-P Pokémon Center promo (still sealed).

This card is part of a set of five, here is an image for the entire set from my collection:

So, a little backstory:

These cards were only available in five of Japan’s Pokémon Centers between June 16th, 2008 and July 31st, 2008 until the supplies ran out:

• 098: Tokyo’s Pokémon Center (8,945,000 residents in 2010)
• 099: Yokohama’s Pokémon Center (3,689,000 residents in 2010)
• 100: Osaka’s Pokémon Center (2,665,000 residents in 2010)
• 101: Nagoya’s Pokémon Center (2,264,000 residents in 2010)
• 102: Fukuoka’s Pokémon Center (1,464,000 residents in 2010)

I myself didn’t collect during that year, but I estimate that after the first craze, these would all five be worth less than 30 USD in the upcoming few years. Now, 9 years later, I’ve seen the following prices / availability (although I haven’t searched for these cards in particular after I got them, I do look for “Pikachu card” on a daily basis on eBay and Yahoo Japan so I come across them sometimes):

• 98: Usually around 25-50 USD. I’ve seen 3-5 for sale these past 1.5 years on eBay.
• 99: Usually around 5-25 USD. This one you see pretty often. I’ve probably seen 5-10 for sale on eBay these past 1.5 years, but about 1-3 pop up every month on Yahoo Japan these past 7 months since I discovered YJ and Noppin (surprisingly enough there are currently none for sale… ).
• 100: Usually around 15-30 USD. I’ve seen 5-10 for sale these past 1.5 years on eBay.
• 101: About the same as the 98.
• 102: I’ve seen none for sale this past 1.5 years, except for one a couple of weeks ago. The auction for that one is still live: adSealed 5/5 set for 1250 USD. I contacted the seller if he was willing to sell the 102 separately, but unfortunately he was asking 800 USD, a bit above my budget for this card. In his description he also mentions the following:

We sorted through over 872 Japanese retail stores, and only ever found 1 of these cards sealed from our consignment purchases.

They don’t pop up at all on yahoo auctions or ebay.

It also came to my attention that Scott (@smpratte ) has the complete set in PSA10 (including 102/DP-P) returning from PSA as we speak. He was more than willing to break his set for that same 800 USD price-point, even for the PSA10 version of the 102/DP-P. Personally I estimate the value of this card around 200-600 USD, which is a very large margin and it’s basically equal to the following: “I honestly don’t know; there are too few of these sold to estimate its current value.”
Well, I’m glad to say that even though these so rarely pop up for sale, I’ve got one now. I’ve been contacted by someone on reddit where I left a similar post as my Pikachu wanted list on E4 with the stated price of 300 USD.

Glad to have this set complete, and once again I’m one step closer to a complete Pikachu collection. After the arrival of a few more incoming cards, there are ‘just’ 72 out of the 810 existing Pikachus left to find.

Greetz,
Quuador

Oct. 2020: Japanese unlimited WCP Seviper and Japanese unlimited edition Web Booster pack containing Moltres (final Seviper TCG card across all languages, and a rare sealed Moltres variant)

@Quuador

They’ve arrived! The Japanese unlimited edition World Championship Seviper card, and the sealed unlimited edition Pokémon Web booster pack containing Moltres. I’m so happy with both of these, especially the Seviper. I’ve been searching for this card ever since I started collecting Seviper 3.5 years ago, and had never even seen a picture of this unlimited edition card prior to purchasing this. Thanks again for both of them, @jrugenious212.

I still have to find the 1st edition version of the Pokémon Web booster pack to complete my Moltres collection, and there are also still two Indonesian Seviper cards incoming in the mail before I will have 100% completed my Seviper collection. But I’m already so happy to cross of this goal!

Greetz,
Quuador

Jul. 2021: Japanese unlimited edition E1 Pikachu (very rare Japanese Pikachu)

@Quuador

It’s here!

To quote myself from the What’s your most recent purchase? thread:

@Quuador

Some of you have already heard the news, but the majority not yet. Little over a month ago I lost an auction for an unlimited edition E1 Pikachu. Because Buyee has a limit of 300,000 Japanese Yen, I couldn’t bid any higher and it ended at 301,000. That price surprised me, considering it was a heavy played copy.

But, now I’m glad I lost that one, since a second (heavy played) copy from the same seller popped up two weeks ago. Which I ended up winning for 101,000 Japanese Yen, 1/3rd of that first one I lost.
It arrived at the Buyee warehouse a couple of days ago, and after I requested photos I just confirmed it’s indeed the unlimited edition version I was expecting, so it’ll soon be incoming to my place.

Very exciting to finally have been able to buy this illusive Japanese Pikachu card, considering I’ve been searching for it ever since I started collecting Pikachu cards seven years ago and it’s one of just 12 Pikachu cards I was missing. It may be in trash condition and still costed about 1k euros despite that, but I don’t care. Finding these Pikachu cards is hard enough as is, so I’m not too worried about condition. If it was NM it might actually have attracted a lot more bidders and ending up above what I could or would be willing to pay.

For those unaware of the significance of Japanese unlimited edition E1 cards, I can refer to this thread and this post on @pichufan 's blog. They’re still surrounded in a lot of mystery, but bits and pieces of information have emerged over the years including very recently. Regardless of their origin, they are among the rarest unlimited edition Japanese cards that exist, and a pain for any collector completionsts like myself. So I’m happy to say that ‘pain’ is now over, seven years after I started collecting Pikachu cards (assuming it arrives at my place without any issues in the near future).

Greetz,
Quuador

Nov. 2022: Swedish sealed Moltres promo (final sealed Moltres variant)

@Quuador

One of my biggest wanted items arrived today: the sealed Moltres with Swedish insert, the final sealed Moltres I was missing[1]. Thanks a lot to @martincollects for finding one for me!

I now have all ten of them, and especially the Australian, Swedish, and both Japanese ones took quite a while to find. Below a picture of all ten. In order, they are:

US (English error illustrator)	UK (English corrected illustrator)	Australian (English corrected illustrator)	Norwegian (English corrected illustrator)	Swedish (English corrected illustrator)
Japanese (1st edition Pokémon Web booster pack)	Japanese (unlimited edition Pokémon Web booster pack)	German	French	Italian

Greetz,
Quuador

Sep. 2024: English Ashley Art Academy Pikachu (final English Pikachu card)

@Quuador

I completely forgot to update my collection thread, so before a new update, I’m just gonna quote my post of ‘the most recent purchase’ thread:

@Quuador

What’s your most recent purchase?

Oh, nothing special. Just the final English Pikachu TCG card I was missing.

It arrived today. Although I still have some incoming recent releases, with this grail I now own ALL (315 at time of writing) existing officially released Pikachu TCG cards. It may have costed me more than the car I recently bought, but it’s so worth it. Although for the first 25 years of Pokémon I’ve already completed some other languages (Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, T. Chinese, Polish, Russian, Thai and Indonesian), I’ve stopped collecting all languages since the 25th Pokémon Day (Feb. 27th, 2021) since it wasn’t feasible to continue with all languages. With English I’ve continued however, so (again, minus some recent incoming releases) I now officially own ALL English Pikachu TCG cards, after 9 years of collecting. I’m beyond happy rn.

Thanks again @chibicollectables for making this possible (and for upgrading the grade of your own copy ).

Greetz,
Quuador

Of course, although it’ll take A LOT of time, browsing through my collection thread shows more of those kind of posts.

Right now, my Seviper TCG; Moltres; FA Supporter; Ancient Mew PSA-10; Swablu; and first card per language collections are all complete, and I’m primarily just keeping up with new releases. For Pikachu I’m missing just 9 cards, and I’m almost at 2k Pikachu cards in total (1867 with 5 incoming to at time of writing, to be exact). And my main focus rn is Seviper non-TCG stuff (for which French items are indeed more expensive as well ).

Greetz,
Quuador