Show some of your favorite Moderately Played, Heavily Played, or Damaged cards. If you can, include a picture of the card inside of your binder.
Here’s my submission:
This Unlimited Neo Discovery Tyranitar is from my childhood. It is in rough shape, but looks decent in a binder.
One of my favorite cards as a kid. I’ll eventually replace it with a clean 1st edition version for my discovery binder but I’m definitely going to keep the original.
Also one of only 2 surviving ex’s from my childhood. This one has been replaced by a nm copy for my ex dragon binder so this one goes in my extra’s binder.
I must have traded for this as a kid, I didn’t open any Japanese packs after neo destiny. It looks like a cat chewed on the corner lol
The one that was given to me when I visited the cinema as an 8 or 9 y.o. kid. 
Graded it a few years back for nostalgia sake. My favorite artwork of all TCG cards.
Greetz,
Quuador
My first Chansey!
This is my original Southern Island Ledyba. 
I traded for it at Toys R Us in 1999. Its why I fell in love with the set. I carried it around with a few other holo cards in soft sleeves. The corner bend is from having it in my cargo shorts while playing outside.
My cousin got the WB first movie promo card and I’m not sure what happened, but it was bent in half and he was going to throw it away. I asked him for it instead and I kept it in my old binder since.
Most my cards were kept in a binder and although I didn’t take the best care of them, they still generally were in good condition. This is one of the exceptions 
This Blastoise was my favorite card!
It’s also a pop 1 
which is fitting because you can’t replace your favorite childhood card.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 3.5. Low grades are so all over the place anyways and they really couldn’t decide between 3 or 4? 
Fossil Magmar is one of my favorite arts from wotc and one of the many reasons why Arita is one of my favorite Pokemon artists. When I was going through my collection when reentering the hobby, I found this card and was weirdly nostalgic towards it. I’m not sure what’s actually on the card (and I’m not going to taste it to find out) but my guess is some kind of BBQ sauce or Ketchup… I’ve since dubbed it my “BBQ Sauce Magmar”.
Shroomish is one of my favorite Pokemon. I love its derpy expression and its evolution Breloom always ends up on my Emerald team. I like to think the ink spots are actually poison from Shroomish itself Gen 3 is the generation of the tcg I’m most nostalgic towards, and this card is one of my favorites.
I guess I wasn’t a huge fan of Haunter growing up 
The Gym sets took a while for me to like when I returned to collecting. I think my lack of game knowledge made me dislike the gym cards (similar to Trainer Gallery Cards today). Nowadays I love them! Having the trainer’s name really helps with learning the huge cast of characters Pokemon has and helps create a sense of card and set identity. If you like Ken Sugimori art, the gym sets are for you.
Like many others on e4, I also collected Yu-Gi-Oh cards. However, I actually played Yugioh with family and spent many many days coming up with overpowered decks. Sleeves were an afterthought and I often kept my deck secured with rubber bands! With Pokemon, I got joy out of opening up packs and trying to buy as many Lv. X tins as I could. I mostly sorted Pokemon cards by their designs and total HP. Holos, reverses, secret rares, etc were all terms I never learned of until retuning to the hobby later on. It didn’t matter whether a card was an uncommon or a rare. It was the art that was most important.
This particular trio used to sit unsleeved in my dresser for “safe keeping”. That was probably how they got bent in half…
Launcher Spider was one of my all time favorite Yugioh cards. I loved its high attack and defense and often tried using it in my decks. It being a giant spiked mechanical missile spider was eye candy.
The first couple years of Yugioh TCG were filled with non-effect monster cards (many of them terrible competitively) that would eventually be phased out in favor of effect monsters and other cool stuff. Something about the early arts really captured my eye. I remember googling Yugioh cards on my family computer to try and find other cards that resembled the art style of this death spider.
Hope you enjoyed.
Get that beauty slabbed, qwa
Maybe I’ll get a pedigree
Ah yes, the rare misprint “BBQ Sauce Magmar”, its existence was only a rumor until now…
This was the only card that got destroyed by my hands as a kid. Generally i took very good care of my cards but as i had a habit of rearranging my binder again and again it was bound to happen that eventually i bent one when putting it in binder pocket. Topps cards don’t really handle pressure very well when it comes from the edge of the card so ended up like this. I actually bent another card the same way as an adult but luckily neither of these weren’t very big cards
