I know its a meme that most of xy was printed to oblivion but Iwondered how does black and white fair with the overprinting. From my memory as a pokemon fan Black and White it would be Pokemon’s second lull point, I remember there was severe backlash about the new pokemon designs (I am garbage pokemon seriously) and the 5th gen was overall the worst selling generation in the series. With the amazing sequel not even selling 9 million. Did any of this correlate the card game print run and do you think it will affect the prices of those cards in the future?
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I’m eager to see the responses for your question. Pop reports for BW are super low, and as you said, it should be much less popular preceding sets.
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The cards were printed less than XY but more than Diamond and Pearl and especially more than the original ex era. I feel like the TCG really started to gain legs and get a lot of new interest around this time. I don’t have any numbers to back this up but the new EX cards were pretty exciting and cards like Mewtwo, Darkrai, Dark Patch, Catcher, N, the Plasma gimmick, and more remain pretty iconic playable cards. Maybe it’s just recency bias but I feel like this is when Pokémon started taking the card game seriously and thinking more about game design. This is also around the time (2011ish) when online streaming became popular so you could watch Worlds and other tournaments.
I can also say from a collecting perspective that the slightly lower print is compounded by the cards being in abysmal condition straight from the pack. If you want a binder set you won’t have much trouble but if you want the full PSA 10 set you are in for a wild ride compared to today’s sets.
All in all Black and White has the best (and first) Full Art cards by a mile and I think it’s a cool era of cards to collect with decent challenge when you get to the high grades.
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I personally think that a majority of black and white was highly under appreciated, aside from legendary treasures which contained the first run of the radiant collection. That full art mew is one of the best modernish mew cards, in my own opinion
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Yea very true. That could be though because there isn’t enough demand for most people to think its worth psa grading the cards. Still the secret rares are still super low with Charizard secret rare being worth a few hundred dollars and has a lower pop than even the gold star charizard and obviously a much lower pop than like the 3 secret rares and the shiny gx charizards that were in the sun and moon sets (and looks much better than those charizards imo lol)
Very good points and it could be true that maybe the BW cards were produced more because of the increase popularity of people more interested in the card game. I do however I feel without any physical data its harder to really tell which set was printed more besides the obvious (XY, sun and moon to a lesser extent and the first generation sets) besides that it gets kind of murky whether x era was printed more than another era or is it just newer with less demand at the moment. I remember during black and whites era which is probably only a few years less that black and white is to present, most of the booster boxes(and cards within them) were worth quite a bit less than the black and white booster boxes are today. But that could also be because pokemons popularity has risen expontentially so it only makes sense for the black and white booster boxes to be worth more than the diamond and pearl boxes are worth within the same timeframe.