I am thrilled to share that my trading partner safely received their card and our exchange was a success! Hurray!! We did it!!! We are both going to make our own posts about it in different threads, but here is my tale!
When I first started collecting cards again as an adult in 2008, I did what most people did and began building WotC sets. The magnetism I felt towards these cards was undeniable, but among them were also WotC Black Star promos.
As a boy, there was something magical about promotional cards. You couldn’t get them from booster packs or decks. Kids could never really say definitively where they came from either. They just appeared and kids had them. They traded and passed them around and how many there were or where they came from was shrouded in confusion. When it came time to indulge in Pokémon as an adult, seeking the edges of the great promo patchwork was one of my priorities. I saw lots of cards I never saw before and I collected all the WotC English promos from the variety of releases. This was the most fun I had during that time, they were the cards I loved the most, but it was also the “set” I finished first.
I put them away as a complete portfolio and only occasionally had the opportunity to add to it. That’s one of the reasons I love the Kanzenban Mewtwo — that card gave me another treasure to hunt in a collection I thought long-complete. But for the most part I focused on my proper sets and did not deviate from that track for 10 years.
But a little over two years ago, I started to develop a hunger. Being more active in the community and seeing what others were collecting put lots of cards back in front of me. Nothing caught and held my attention like promos though — specifically Japanese vintage. These cards were so vast, varied, and eclectic. Every card told a story, every card had a history, every card was special. I started to get a little disillusioned with my set collecting as I neared completing them. It was obvious where I wanted to go next.
As I researched which cards would be obtainable and which cards I’d have to rule out, there was an easy delineation I could make between promotional cards and the more exclusive trophy category. I didn’t see any cards I couldn’t someday conceivably collect. That was a great feeling. But just before I pulled the trigger and made the leap into a new world of collecting, I saw this legendary thread by ProChaos: Japanese Ivy Pikachu Reprinted CoroCoro Variant
I stopped dead in my tracks here. A reprint that’s almost impossible for the layman to identify with a print run of only a couple thousand? How would I ever find this card? I meditated on this for months. Did I really want to start a collection I could never finish?
I’d never get this card. 
Fast-forward to November 2022. The time had come to liquidate my WotC sets I had spent so many years collecting. This was like letting go of a big part of myself, an autobiography in cardboard, but I knew the time was right. With the money from the sale I knew what I wanted to do — I wanted Japanese promos and I wanted Kinebuchi’s Pikachu.
I had spent two years looking for it already on Japanese auction sites. I had never seen one. My hopes of finding one listed randomly or erroneously had been diminished and I knew it would be a miracle to get the card that way. The time had come to pony up and go public and submit to the terrifying ordeal of being known.
This thread yielded a couple of hints and leads here and there, but nothing that panned out. I upped the price by $500 every chance I got. But it was obvious the card was just not around to buy. This isn’t the sort of card people let go of.
Then @thymeee messaged me. It was so understated. He let me know he had the card, but it wasn’t for sale. He was just messaging me out of courtesy to let me know where one was. I appreciated this. Knowing where one of the cards was counted for something. We got talking, though.
As we wrapped up our cordial exchange, Thymeee asked me to let him know if I ever saw one of his own grails — a Mysterious Pearl. I’d never heard of this card before, so I popped on eBay just to confirm the card he was looking for. Most of the listings were 3x what I was could offer for the Pikachu, but one of them… wasn’t.
I think both of us felt the electricity here. The Mysterious Pearl we were looking at was much more affordable than any comparable listing. It was still more Thymeee could afford at the moment, and it was more than I was offering for the Pikachu, but it was something.
I asked myself an easy question: if the Kinebuchi Pikachu was available right now for the same price the Mysterious Pearl was listed, would I buy it? The answer was yes. So we struck a deal.
I would purchase the Mysterious Pearl and then we would trade. Thymeee was based on the Netherlands and I am based in the United States, so it took a lot of trust to even attempt. We were nervous about the international shipping, we were nervous about customs, we were nervous of such a high dollar trade, but we did it and it just… worked. It all went perfectly for both of us.
Thymeee and I are both extremely pleased and excited. We both have cards we didn’t know if we’d ever own. Before we talked to each other we had no idea how we’d ever get these cards. But now we both have them.
Trading with Thymeee was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in this hobby, and in an increasingly cynical and high-stakes culture of adult collectors it was absolutely magical to have an honest-to-goodness trade like we were still kids. Getting this promo this way feels just like it did when I was a boy. Someone else just had it, and we traded, and now I have the only one I’ve ever seen. What a dream.
Thank you so much for this card and this experience, Thymeee. I’ll never forget this!