Question? What pokemon do you not envy collecting?

Collecting
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Title says it all? What species do you not envy collecting?
My top ones are as follows.
1 - psyduck
2 - very close behind with pikachu
3 - eeveelutions

I collect eeveelutions, and the thought of collecting eeveelutions in all languages is the thing nightmares are made of

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I feel very sorry for anyone wanting to collect charizards or pikachus. It’s simply not possible for a lot of collectors to pay some of those premiums to catch em all

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3

I forgot about the overhyped fire lizard haha

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Charizard. Its the reason I decided to collect Greninja. Despite being my favorite Pokemon, Charizard is just too expensive to collect.

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Brionne, I’m not sure TPC even knows it exists anymore

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A lot of them, i’ve speculated with a lot of species how it would be like to collect them and tons of them have some super rare card or cameo like snap card or some old trophy which would be horrible if you want to catch them all like i do. Pokemon like koffing, doduo, fearow, jigglypuff, exeggutor and so many others have such difficult chase cards

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Yeah, any Pokemon that’s on a trophy card or SNAP card would be rough.

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Gengar

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RAY RAY

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Butterfree

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Any of the evolutions staff prerelease cards. Im not rich, and the price on the graded cards is waaaaaaay out of my price range and i wont go into debt over cards.

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Pikachu. A million dollars in cards and cameos if you want a master set in all languages, youd be better off buying a few houses.

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Master’s Community College diploma

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Agree with Pikachu and Psyduck. Pikachu for just the sheer number of cards and non-TCG things he has—seems straight impossible to have any sort of complete Pikachu collection, no matter how much money you have. And Psyduck being on every world’s promo is certainly not helpful!

@joponnes Out of curiosity, what difficult cards do Doduo and Fearow have?

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15

Rayquaza, even though it’s my favorite Legendary Pokémon, my name derives from it and I use one as my profile pic, the combination of multiple Japanese trophy cards existing and the popularity (and therefore price) of the Goldstar make me abstain from even thinking about starting a Rayquaza collection atm. Maybe someday if I have the money I’ll try to go for something like all German Rayquazas, but I’m definitely not starting a full species collection there.

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These little fellows:

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Latios and Latias are definitely two pokemon that I would not want to collect ever, even if the pokemon are cool. They are a combination of very expensive TCG cards and fully complete and gigantic and ultra-rare Pokemon Center vintage merch (plushes, postcard, stickers. inflatable pool ring, mugs, cushions, ANYTHING basically) and also a lot of rivals :laughing:

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Ah yeah, forgot about the TMB English VS cards. A lot of species there that would be really difficult to get.

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Well the English cards would at least be somewhat doable (although of course very difficult). German, French and Italian would probably rather be lost causes though if you aren’t like a millionaire or something with them being literal 1/1 cards (at least according to what’s currently known).

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I’ve bought a house and still have my Pikachu collection. :pikasunglasses: Although I don’t deal with cameos for obvious reasons…

As someone with nine years of experience of collecting Pikachu in all languages though, I can defintely say I don’t envy Pikachu collectors. :wink: Especially if you start in this market. Although a lot of cards are easier to find now than when I started, they’re also at least ten times as expensive on average… I’ve stopped collecting all languages for a reason since February 27th, 2021 (25th Pokémon Day), since despite my full-time job as a software developer, my bank account went down while I was collecting… At time of writing, I’m still missing the same 10 cards I did back then (from the total 1433 official Pikachu TCG releases of the first 25 years). I did (eventually) manage to keep up with all new English and non-English exclusive artwork releases, though. :slight_smile:

Anyway, I’d say species collector disadvantages can be split into a couple major categories for the TCG:

  • One or multiple high value cards. E.g. SNAP; Art Academy; and other very low pop cards. If there are just one or two, I guess it’s plausible with a lot of patience; saving; and perhaps a bit of luck. Good examples of this are @shizzlemetimbers with his SNAP Gyarados and @qwachansey with his SNAP Chansey and Creatures Deck 1995 Chansey. :slight_smile: Their collection additions were truly awe-inspiring.
  • Multiple high value cameo cards: E.g. Pikachu trophy cards; Psyduck trophy cards; etc. I know a lot of other Pikachu collectors and also a couple of Psyduck collectors, and none collect cameos (seriously), since they know they won’t be able to afford all of those trophy cards.
  • Just a way too popular Pokémon in general: E.g. Pikachu; Charizard; Eeveelutions. Although there are defintely cheap cards among them, the shear abundance of releases can be, and usually is, very overwhelming. Especially when dealing with all languages. For Charizard I’ve only known a single collector who went for all languages, and he actually managed to get quite a lot of them up until around 2018 or so. But since prices kept increasing and increasing, I’m pretty sure he stopped collecting all together after a while. As for Pikachu, from personal experience: it was far from fun when in 2019 a total of 233 Pikachu TCG cards were released. And 2020/2021 was equally lacking fun because almost every new release was much higher than previous years due to the hype. Even the English 25th anniversary McDonald’s Pikachu printed in the millions was 35-55 bucks on release, whereas they’re usually <10 in all previous years. And this is just one example. There were of course also cards that in previous years would have been 100-200 on release and were now 1k+…
  • A way too unpopular Pokémon: Although they’ve finally released more cards, Mantyke had just one English artwork and two Japanese exclusive ones for over a decade. If Mantyke would have been your favorite Pokémon around its release, it would have been a very boring collecting journey, even if you would go for all languages. There are still a lot of Pokémon with less than 4 different artworks, even though some of them are Pokémon that have existed for over 15 years. This, especially with the 233 Pikachu TCG releases in a single year, can sometimes make me pretty angry, even if I don’t know any collectors for those specific Pokémon.
  • Collecting in high NM+ and/or graded 9+ (perhaps even in all languages): Collecting all cards of a certain Pokémon can be tricky to begin with. All English cards is usually not too hard depending on the Pokémon; add all Japanese and it becomes a bit trickier, especially with certain unlimited edition releases; add all languages, and it becomes a multi-year collection goal (I completed my Seviper collection in all languages after ~3.5 years). But, if you also care about good condition, or even want to go for a graded set, it adds another level of difficulty to it all, and makes it not only a lot harder but also more expensive to try to complete. Some of the cards in my collection I have only seen a handful of times. So when the opportunity was given to finally add these cards to my collection after years of searching, I couldn’t care less about condition. If you do care about condition, you may wait forever for a good quality copy to pop up for sale…

Greetz,
Quuador

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