Hi guys! I was hoping to get some info on a matter of a japanese raichu card that recently popped up on a site recently: i59.tinypic.com/65vgns.jpg
(I hope the image link works!)
I’ve seen other cards with the black bulbasaur logo but I don’t know if I just suck at googling but I can’t really find anything when I try to look this card up online, and when I’ve searched for japanese raichus on different auction sites, I only find the japanese editions of base set, fossil, etc…
The guy who sells this usually has a “buy it now” price that is pretty damn overpriced most of the time (I shopped a birthday card pikachu from him before I knew better, and could’ve probably gotten it for half the price in the same condition ahem.) Anyway this time it’s an auction. So I was wondering, how much does this card go for usually? It’s super cute anyway!
@collector1243: oooh thanks for identifying the set! i’ve been searching for black bulbasaur logo and i haven’t managed to find anything. thanks for clearifying this to me! and wow this is from where that super cool bulbasaur holding a pokéball comes from… i love that card.
@vodka: yes! i hope i can win it. the demand of japanese cards isn’t that high in sweden from what i’ve seen, but there are still some lurkers… and my experience from swedish people who buy pokémon cards is that they have this delusion of that cards are worth MUCH more than they actually are. i’ve followed some auctions on swedish sites where BADLY damaged charizard base set/base set two/legends set have gone for over $70 dollars at times. we’re talking creases in the card, big silvery patches scraped into the open all over the cards, and fuzzy edges like a dog chew on it…so auction prices can go really bonkers sometimes because people are so eager to get their hands on that ELUSIVE 120 HP charizard card that everyone was fawning over in their childhood, predicting it’d probably be worth MILLIONS in the future… haha.
Yeah, its a sweet card. Definitely hard to track the marketable price on Pokemon trading cards now-days. Same thing happens in Australia, people bidding ridiculous prices for cards.
In a way I prefer that though, it makes collecting a little more exiting and challenging to find what you want for a good price. Plus you can sometime earn a bit extra if it happens to you aha.
I still need to get the Intro set though, the artwork is really cool.
@collector1243: Yes that bulbasaur! It’s so precious. I first saw it in a pojo magazine i got in the early 00’s. i really wish i still had my pojo magazines they were so cozy… and i saw now that it didn’t belong in this set at all haha! it was some other bulbasaur. still really sweet though. Silly me I actually have a Vulpix from the vending machine series.
Maybe I should try and collect more of those, since I seem to enjoy them a lot. The black star promo Pikachu seems to be from this set originally now that I’ve checked a bit. (I’m really new to this and don’t have much knowledge when it comes to sets/history of cards so if I’m ever off feel free to correct me~)
Haha nice, I want to buy a bulk lot of magazines from that sort of time just to have a look at what they say about the cards back then but haven’t found one yet…
Sweet, the vending series has some nice cards in, I probably prefer the charmander out of all of them. Why not, they are reasonably easy to come by so assembling the sets shouldn’t be too hard. The pikachu is the same artwork yes but I believe it was printed as another card before this but im not 100% off the top of my head.
Hey Guppy, just to let you know the video intro set has a bulbasaur and squirrel deck so you’ll see both of those symbols out there. Japanime is a member on here that has them sealed. You could talk to him if you want to buy the entire video intro set.
Also looking at the artwork you enjoy I highly recommend collecting the vending series. I love their unique artwork. That bulbasaur that you like, I’ve always loved too! Its an awesome bulbasaur! also seems you have an affinity for pikachu and raichu, so you may want to at least get your hands on the vending raichu: bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Raichu_(Vending_S2)
Just to help you keep some things straight when collecting the vending series cards, there are quick starter cards that are reprints of the vending cards but their on matte card stock instead of glossy like the vending.
@collector1243: yeah i’d like to find those magazines again too! i loved the pojo ones. since i’ve always been crazy about drawing, i was all over the fakemon pages they featured in that magazine; where people sent out there made up pokémon. and the card reviews were really cool. i remember them always hyping the base set electabuzz card, and i was so PROUD over the one i had; base set electabuzz was my first rare pull EVER in my first booster EVER. that card is still very very precious to me and i’m really happy it wasn’t in the lot that my parents threw out.
@timewaster1700: ahh thank you so much about all this info! i’m actually really excited about maybe getting my hands on the vending series. i actually ordered a vending raichu from ebay a while back. i have no idea if the condition is actually as near mint as the selder claimed since i’ve heard that the term can be pretty loose, but it didn’t look bad on the photo. i don’t think it was a glossy one though, and i had no idea about that before now! so did i get this right; the glossy ones are the actual vending cards, and the matte cards are reprints of that set? really helpful, thanks again!
it’s kinda fun to be new to all this because there’s so much to learn haha~
Hey no problem I know I’ve learned a ton in the past couple years after getting back into collecting and there’s still SO much I don’t know. Ya sellers definitely have differing views of what the term “mint” or “near mint” means. Sadly it usually doesn’t line up with my definition. On cheaper cards its less of a big deal, but its very frustrating on expensive ones. I’ve certainly returned my share of ebay cards. Its helpful if they can post a picture of the back, especially at an angle that catches the light and shows any scratches or indentations on the back. Of course whitening on the edges is never great either.
So the glossy will be the vending series cards. The non glossy are from the quick starter set I believe. I don’t think there are any other identical reprints of the vending whiteout them changing a symbol or something. So if its non glossy and still has that same vending symbol it is most likely a quick starter card which is totally fine, they can be pretty rare as well. Please someone with more knowledge correct me if i’m wrong.
update: i won the auction! :’) i was almost sniped when there was under one minute left, but i put out a max bid that the other person didn’t have time to outbid in the few last seconds. i really thought i’d lost it a couple of seconds though, because i didn’t know how to place bids on the site’s app and fumbled around a bit. (i wasn’t home at the time.)
26 kronor! i hope it was a good price. about 3 dollars.
I probably wrote a dozen articles for them, maybe even more. A couple of the more memorable ones (for me, anyway) were:
a) An article about an unofficial (not owned by Nintendo/Creatures/etc) Japanese website where you could ask Pikachu any sort of random question (by typing it into a form) and get what seemed to be personlized response in real time. It was either operated by an actual, very dedicated person who was replying to the questions, or more likely used a very sophisticated algorithm.
b) An article about buying Japanese Base Set Charizard cards for as little as 50 yen each — simply because Japanese kids didn’t place a high monetary value on rare cards. If they had a spare, they’d happily sell it (or even give it) to a friend who needed the card.
There were others, but those two stand out in my mind the most.
