Calling species all language collectors!!
I am collecting Kabutops line in all languages and was curious to get an insight from other “all language species collectors” on how they find it?
What challenges do you face with other languages, like russian and polish being extremely hard to locate or finding ex era spanish cards being a pain in the proverbial. or my favorite, the french premium tax that appears to be on almost all french cards 
My time to shine!
Russian and Polish you really just need to get extremely lucky (or know a contact, which also amounts to getting lucky). Right now I have 4/9 Polish cards and 3/6 Russian cards for my Piplup collection, and it’s taken me years to find those.
I’ve kept a saved search on all platforms for “Russian Pokemon” and “Polish Pokemon” that I go through every day, sometimes more than once. This helps me keep tabs on new listings fairly easily, and allows me to also see lots or mislabeled product that I wouldn’t necessarily catch with “Russian Piplup,” for example.
Even though my favorite penguin is gen 4 and doesn’t have anything in the ex era, my wife collects cyndaquil, mareep, and the spheal line. From our experience with those, Spanish is actually not too bad- we’ve found all of hers on CardTrader (we’re US -based and don’t have regular access to CardMarket). French ex era is more difficult for her to find than Spanish by a pretty large margin.
I was speaking to another species collector who said that the French are all full of themselves, hence the high prices on cards, haha. (Of course, no offense to French people here.) French cards having high prices is unfortunately something I’ve just had to bite the bullet on. Sometimes you’ll get a nice seller who will do bulk discounts for you, which is appreciated.
In all, I think all-language species collecting is much more of a time investment than people may realize initially. Of course, you’ll have the expensive cards you might need to save up for, but you’ll also spend years trying to even find certain cards that you’d think wouldn’t be much issue upon first glance (cough, unlimited XY8, cough).
There are a lot of different challenges, and aside from the ones you mentioned, a few come to mind: non-English, non-Japanese bulk not even being listed because profit margins are too low for a 10 cent Korean card, making them so hard to find online. Documenting all of the different variants and promos, since there isn’t one single resource we can go to. Compiling all of that information into a checklist you can keep track of, and making sure that stays up to date. Some variants we don’t have proof of existing besides one blog post from 2009, so do we even include those on the checklist (DP-era Italian countdown calendar promos come to mind for me).
To answer the first part of your post, I mostly just take it slow. I don’t need to have everything right away- collecting, especially all-language, all-variant, all-everything species collecting, is about the journey for me. I’ve made so many friends and acquaintances through species collecting, and that’s the most valuable part of it in my opinion.
such an amazing response!!
my biggerest challenge im finding with my line up is unlimited dutch fossil cards.
they just dont exist (even tho they technically do haha)
unlimited spanish fossil rare cards are almost non existent also
and for modern, i find portuguese impossible to find unless you know someone in latin america
I’ve seen some people have luck on CardMarket, but Dutch seems so difficult to find! I count myself lucky that my favorite Pokemon is gen 4, haha.
I’ve heard this too! Best I can do is offer to keep my eyes peeled for you o7
I completely agree. I’ve found my Portuguese cards over on CardTrader, but modern Portuguese is so difficult to find. I wish I had a contact in Latin America, haha. For now, I’ve just been keeping a close eye on places like eBay/CT/CM, but it’s a slow process for sure.
Best help is to make friends with someone in each region that also collects their language. Even better if you can help them with their collection goals as well.
I’m collecting every WOTC Gyarados in every language and variation. Your best bet is to find someone who can use cardmarket or just have many specific searches on ebay but patience is key!
I collect Omanyte/Omastar/Delibird cards in all languages. I’m doing it kinda slow due to I’m trying to complete other goals as well.
Well … It depends. Sometimes I search them, I find them by accident or people let me know that it’s on sale.
Generally I search them. I do a Google Sheets chart to keep everything organized. Based on that, I try to search first the rarest and cheapest variants first.
I think my challenge as a collector in general are 2:
For Oriental languages such as Thai or Indo, I guess the challenge I have is more related to middleman. I have to search one …
Spanish only had 2 expansions released during EX era: Ruby & Sapphire and Unseen Forces. From these 2, the rarest cards come from Unseen Forces. To be more specific: Reverse Holo cards … and also the 2 ex Secret cards such as Rocket’s Persian and Celebi ex
Spanish POP Series 3 and Spanish POP Series 7 are at an intermediate point …
Other Spanish expansions that are painful to find are:
These WoTC Promos in Spanish are extremely rare and are technically a myth, but I know some friend collectors who have them in their collections …
Yes, I’ve heard French cards are expensive. I’ve heard that boosters are near 10 euros … 
Yes, having contacts is important in this hobby. They can sell you things or let you know about a sale of a card that might interest you … and in some cases, they can work as a middleman
For Mareep and Cyndaquil, the ones that might be hard to find are the Unseen Forces Reverse Holos … For some reason, they’re very fought in a very niche group of Pokémon TCG collectors … I had luck with my Spanish Unseen Forces Reverse Holo Meganium (card I still have in my collection)
I’ve heard of that site … I tried selling there, but they gave me a lot of excuses that ended up demotivating me …
How’s it for buying??? … I’ve heard that they have a warehouse where you can keep your items … Do you recommend it???
One that comes to my mind are some specific variants that not too many know about such as NON-LOGO WoTC 2,3,4 & 5 (all of them in English) … it seems they were a misprint distributed in low quantities …
And also some expansions in specific languages. I’ve heard that Korean Unlimited Base Set is almost impossible to find … People trying to hunt common cards from that expansion for almost 8-10 years …
Korean ADV Expansion Pack is also hard to find …
The awful part is that not all info is well-documented. It’s hard to find which variants exist (mostly the information comes from collectors) and it’s sad that not too many sites care about that …
Currently I’m trying to document all variants in all languages in the Spanish Wiki … Up to now I’ve only written in detail about variants of Base Set Charizard … and some other cards.
I’m thankful that sites such as Pokumon exists … Amazing job …
Agree … The most important about collecting Poke TCG/Yu-Gi are the friends we made in the process … and that’s what I appreciate the most …
Well that of course depends on the language, for me there are basically three ways of finding cards, each increasingly difficult:
The easiest and also most used option for me is just straight up buying cards on Cardmarket or ebay. As I’m in Europe all European languages besides Portuguese are very easy to obtain for me since I can usually just buy the cards on Cardmarket. All Japanese cards I needed (apart from the unlimited XY8 of course) were also available on Cardmarket and the majority of Korean cards as well as old Portuguese cards too. On ebay there are sometimes cards in the non Japanese Asian languages available too which might not be on Cardmarket.
Online marketplaces in other countries. Here firstly I need a middleman (in case of the remaining Portuguese cards /Ligapokemon that was another collector, for all the remaining Asian cards I used commercial proxy shopping sites). The searching for languages not available on Cardmarket / ebay is of course also a bit more difficult as you have to search for the cards in their respective languages or else you won’t get good results. At the beginning a challenge also was to find out what the main online marketplaces for private sellers in each country were respectively, but now I generally know on what sites to look.
That question leads me to the third and probably most difficult way to obtain cards: Contacting people you know or you suspect might have the card directly. In these cases communication can often be a bit slow and take several weeks, but in the end that was also how I got 4/6 of the most challenging cards to find for me.
I always find it funny when I see people on Reddit probably coming from the “investing” side and being new that are convinced French cards are definitely worth less than English. If you are regularly on Cardmarket you know that at least for modern cards it is an unwritten rule that the French copy of the card you’re looking for will always be the most expensive (and the same goes for sealed products).
the XY8 seems to have popped up regularly in this thread, can i ask how rare it is?
I have had to contend with XY10 unlimited with my mons and more painfully, WCP.
are they rarer than them? as i thought unl wcp was the rarest japanese set to find
Definitely not rarer than WCP. I’ve seen I would guess about 20-25 unlimited XY8 cards in the 18 months I’ve been looking for the unlimited Staraptor, just not the one I’m searching for. My estimate would be that maybe about 5% of the sets total print run were unlimited cards.
yeah cool, so its one of those sets where you just grab what you can find when you find it…
unlimited dutch fossil is proving to be my proverbial "bastard child"to find haha
Did someone call me ?
Shh, snorlax doesnt count 
The one Kabutops that pops to mind is the Dutch Fossil Unlimited Kabutops Holofoil and the regular Rare. You will fidn 1st ed Dutch, but Unl is a different story…
If anyone needs any Korean cards, I will be heading back to Korea for two weeks at the end of November and can keep a lookout for some cards if anyone needs anything.
I need 5 more Korean card 
Plz find me any Base set Korean stuff 
I am a Charizard collector and trying to get every WOTC language and variant. There are a few challenges:
One: It’s expensive.
Two: Americans don’t like the alternate language cards so that does help when buying but they aren’t as common in the states.
Three: You will have to pay lots of fees on Ebay if you find the other languages from sellers who will ship them to you.
Four: A lot of the alternate language cards are ROUGH. The high graded ones are very sought after and 1st edition in a good grade is very scarce and expensive.
Five: Nobody will understand why you’re collecting all these languages.
I have only a minor contribution to make here as an american who doesn’t collect all language for the whole species but did it just for a single card. I did all languages for the Jungle Eevee (unlimited) and knowing where to look other than ebay is make or break haha. I’d never heard of cardtrader prior to joining E4, I just assumed people bought their foreign cards on ebay. Lo and behold, an italian jungle eevee was like $2 + $20 shipping on ebay vs $1 + $5 shipping for an entire order, not single card, on cardtrader. Having a middleman or just a friend helping also goes a long way. CardTrader only had listings for english, italian, french, spanish, japanese, and german. However, jungle eevee was printed in portguese and dutch as well. Those languages were available on CardMarket. Language exclusive cards have this issue too sometimes - the confetti foil McDonalds eevee was a french exclusive, I could only find it on cardmarket as well. @jaws brings up a good point about condition also. @joponnes helped me with non-cardtrader cards and noted what constitutes condition (“good, very good, acceptable, NM”, etc) may vary pretty significantly depending on the seller, even moreso than you might find on tcgplayer. Aforementioned mcdonalds eevee (iirc) was listed as good, but woof it was ugly in real life. Binder 10 so no regrets but from a reddit/ebay/tcgplayer perspective, it should’ve been listed as HP or DMG.
Go team LATAM South for species collectors!!
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:
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
