Childhood cards?

Thought this might be a fun topic.

Do you still have any of your childhood cards? If so have you graded them or are they in your binder?

What was the story of pulling them?

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I have graded a few of my childhood cards. The most notable were an Unlimited Base set Charizard which got a PSA 9 and an Unlimited Shining Mewtwo which graded a PSA 10.

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I have zero memory of pulling either because I was very young when I obtained them.

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Got my childhood Big 3 graded last year! Did better than I expected. I was sure the Charizard was a 1.

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Man that is so cool! I need to go through my childhood cards and grade a few. But I don’t know if I should disturb this quality storage! :upside_down_face:

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I think I’ve told this story on here before, but I was too obsessed with cards as a kid so my Mom threw them all away as a punishment. Very cool.

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charmander

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Most of my holos got recycled at some point because I was constantly trading.

But I still have my Jungle Venomoth holo that I pulled from one of my first two packs of Jungle in the winter of 1999/2000. A combination of me liking the card above average and no-one else wanting to trade for it. Ironically it is one of the two holos I haven’t pulled from a 1st ed Jungle pack which I’ve opened a lot of. A gem mint copy has been on my to-do list for some time.

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From my collection thread:

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Every year as a kid, my family would take a week long vacation to Wildwood, NJ. Needless to say, Pokemon merch was EVERYWHERE. You could not walk 10 feet on the boardwalk without seeing a Pikachu or a Pokeball. There was a pier near the beginning of the boardwalk called Seaport Village that only had a few small shops and an outside theater at the back. To most kids, this pier was very uninteresting since there were no rides or amusements. This was actually my favorite pier out of any on the boardwalk. There were so many cool things to see! Those small shops had all sorts of crazy things in them. One was a shop dedicated to Halloween animatronics, another had assortments of all types of shells and sea creatures in bottles of formaldehyde for sale, and another even sold custom bikes and kites. I used to walk in and out of the shops, treating it sort of like a network of museums. I wandered into one shop, my grandma following close behind, and saw almost nothing Pokemon-related, aside from a small box on the front counter. The box had Japanese writing all over it, and the only distinguishable text was the Pokemon logo. The box was filled with packs of cards, the likes of which I had never seen before. Firstly, each pack had about 30 cards inside. 30 CARDS!! There were also images of trainers on the front and a large VS stamp on the top. They were marked $9 each. I begged my grandma to get me one. We went back and forth for a bit as to why the packs were so expensive. She had bought me packs in the past for at most $3 or $4 each. I can’t tell you what amazing stories and claims I came up with about the packs to make them seem as though they were worth the money. She gave in and bought me one pack with a mysterious masked man on the front. At this point, I didn’t own Gold, Silver, or Crystal versions yet, and had only played them a handful of times when friends would let me borrow their cartridges for a few hours at a time. However, I knew enough about the Generation 2 Pokemon to know that some of my favorites were Murkrow, Girafarig, Houndoom, Marill (Pikablu), and Umbreon. She bought me the pack, and with it in hand, I bolted back to our motel room. I burst in the door, grabbed my binder and some sleeves, dove into the bedroom and closed the door, and jumped on the bed. With the concentration and skill of surgeon, I carefully opened the pack. And then, I saw her. A BEAUTIFUL, sleeping, 1st Edition UMBREON!!! I stopped for a few minutes and just stared at it. It was easily the most gorgeous card I had ever seen. I remembered that there were 29 other cards in the pack, and continued on. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Fully evolved Pokemon were common cards! I was completely blown away, even to the point that I started to cry tears of excitement. I honestly couldn’t believe that I had the opportunity to own such amazing and unique cards. I remembered thinking that my friends back home were going to be SSOO jealous!!! I put the cards into sleeves, then into my binder. Umbreon was put into a top loader and propped up against a lamp on the night stand next to the bed so I could fall asleep staring at her. I gathered my wits and went out screaming to my family about what I just experienced. I took them in the room and showed them all of the amazing cards I just uncovered. My grandma must have been very moved by all of this. The next day, she went back to the store and bought the remaining 6 Vs packs and gave them to me. I was so grateful for all of this and attempted to make her dinner that night as a thank you. I was only about 11 at the time, so she had to help me out a little with it haha.

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These are the only holo/“special” cards I have left over from my childhood. I also have some commons & uncommons somewhere in a shoebox


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That lugia is cool. Pokémon the movie 2000 is just chefs kiss and that lugia reminds me of that movie so much

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The cards that I had or seen during my childhood greatly shaped my taste in pokemon. Unfortunately the vast majority were lost or destroyed by too much love lol, but I’m on the mission to buy psa 9 of these childhood grails




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All of mine are in the same binder they’ve been in since I was a kid. Which of course included stuffing duplicates/extras into the same slot in the sheet. So I definitely have stretched pockets that have held like 8 cards for over 20 years. Wonder if some of the outer facing cards are stuck to the plastic… I didn’t even know that penny sleeves and top loaders were a thing. Just that there were normal sleeves that people who played with decks used, but I didn’t care about those.

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99% of my childhood Pokemon cards were lost during house moving. I only kept one card by my side physically – Ancient Mew. Not the most valuable card now but meant alot to me.

Reverse back to year 2020, when I rejoined the hobby and discovered there exist other versions of Ancient Mew, I sold my original kept for almost 20 years card and got myself the JPN “Nintedo” error version PSA 9 because it got the unique shimmering holo.

“Best Pokemon card ever!” :+1: (IMO)

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Still have everything from childhood. They got thrown into a cabinet and stayed there for about 15 years as you can tell from the dust. I remember asking store clerks for the display boxes that were getting thrown out to keep my cards in. About 2 years ago I pulled them out and looked through what I had. Still had a Sabrina and Trouble deck sealed (Now part of my deck collection). I had bought or been gifted almost all the decks to play against siblings and friends but didnt get around to opening some of them because we already had our favorites. The pack wrappers were all opened and feel like just a fraction of what I had opened but I was surprised to find I had opened some triangle errors back in the day. Also had all my figures and literally anything pokemon themed I could find stashed away with them.





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I still have them. There is a page dedicated to them in my favorite binder. Mostly Japanese, tamamushi and yamabuki city decks, plus a few rocket and neo pulls. :slight_smile: My friend Miho from japan gave all the kids cards, before we really knew what they were. I also fell in love with the coins that came in those decks, and for a long time, getting all 6 coins was my goal. Still love them even now that I have 'em all.

Fortunately, I kept most of my childhood collection, and have added to it till today, so it’s a deep part of my current collection.

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I still have them, except for the ones that I traded away back then of course. Here are the respective binder pages (I of course also have lots of holo and bulk cards, but these are not sorted by release date, so I can’t show them together on a photo like these) with cards that I received or pulled later removed:



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I had multiple binders filled with my entire collection safely stored in my childhood closet, when i went to college in 2010 i gave my kid brother permission to look at them and play with them if he wanted. He took that as permission to trade them all away to friends for what was modern at the time, primarily HGSS and B/W era cards. When he told me a few years later I was devastated.

All that remains are 3 holos which I’ve since reclaimed:
Jungle Venomoth
Base 2 Raichu
Base 2 Nidoqueen

However in the process of building my Base-Rocket cube in 2020/2021 I solicited all of my friends (who I’ve known since elementary school) to part with their childhood cards, and 4 of them agreed. I have a whole bunch of their holos and bulk now and in their own way they feel quite special.

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These three are the only cars that are left from my childhood collection. They have been through a lot. Including a washing machine :stuck_out_tongue:

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Still got pretty much all of mine! I sold a couple of them tho, which i slightly regret-- only because i didnt rly do anything meaningful with the money, so i dont have anything to show for it :frowning:

Got 2 signed by Arita in December as well

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