Thanks to my Twitch channel, and the overall general rise and demand for all things video games on the Internet during the pandemic, I had been getting into Pokemon Cards lately. Not spending too much money, but maybe spending more money than I had to.
In March, it was announced that the Pokemon Card company would finally be doing a proper crossover with Pokemon Go. Generally, Pokemon card sets follow the main series of Pokemon games, such as X/Y, Sun/Moon, and Sword/Shield. Sometimes there would be novelty cards that would show up from other spin-off games, but no other spin-off game has been as popular as Pokemon Go. In fact, the overall brand awareness of Pokemon increased significantly after the release of Pokemon Go in 2016, and it has stayed around the same ever since.
This new Pokemon Go set of Pokemon Cards would be an entire expansion of 72 cards, too. Previous novelty sets, like Detective Pikachu and the 25th Anniversary sets were only 20 or 25 cards, and these cards weren’t really all that useful passed their novelty. I don’t actually play the game, so I can’t say whether or not these Go cards are actually useful. But, it seems like they’ve put some actually work into them.
I was able to preorder a box of cards and the long box set from Pokemon Center online, so I got them in the mail as they released on Friday (June 17th). I was able to pick up a few more packs, plus the folder set from a convenience store on the way home after work.
The long box came with a photo frame to hold a card, and a card box that looked like an egg incubator from Pokemon Go. It had some packs of cards, too. The folder pack came with that little folder to hold some cards. It also came with a Pikachu promo card. It also got 5 other promo cards from buying a booster box.
Each booster pack comes with seven cards: a special flashy energy card with the Pokemon Go logo, an item/sticker promo card with a code for Pokemon Go, 2 or 3 common cards, 1 or 2 uncommon cards, and a rare pull. The rare pull could be a simple rare, a V card, V-star card, V-max card, or any other rare card in the set. There are a total of 72 cards in the base set, but an additional 12 or 15 secret rare cards.
For my first pack, I really didn't get anything special. In this case, my rare card was a Gyarados denoted by the R next to the number at the bottom.
The promo code in Pokemon Go can give one of eight different sets of items. There are six common sets and one uncommon set of items with stickers, and there is one rare set which gives clothing for your character.
As I streamed over the following weekends, I opened up some packs for my followers. Immediately, I started getting some good pulls, like the shiny Venusaur and Dragonite V-star card. As my streams continued, I started getting some other good stuff too, like the shiny Blastoise, Mewtwo V-star, and a full art Candela.
I was getting very few duplicates of rare and uncommon cards.
A few weeks later, I had opened up all my packs of cards and was only missing 8 from the base set. Each pack of cards gave a chance to pull a rare card, and those were the 8 that I was missing. Obviously, I could buy more packs for more chances, but it is way more cost effective to just buy what I needed.
Cards weren't too expensive, and I was able to quickly get most of them from Yahoo Auctions, except for one. Within the base set of 72 cards, the most expensive card was Shiny Charizard. My auctions were selling the card for $40, which was way too much for me to spend.
Fast forward six more months and the Shiny Charizard was now only $10 on Yahoo Auctions. I am totally fine with spending $10 on a single Pokemon card as it was the ONE piece remaining from my collection.
Now my collection is complete!
Click the photo below to see the whole set, or individual pages in the gallery.
With prices for cards in the Pokemon Go decreasing, I started looking into other cards I might want to pick up. The Golden Lure and Incubator were pretty cheap at $5 each. Also, each of the Leader and Professor cards were cheap, too.
I bought all of those to fill out my collection.
Now, the only remaining cards are the full arts and fancy arts of Pokemon, which I'm not really interested in collecting. I'm much more interested in going after some uncommon cards in other sets.
So, my collection of Pokemon Go cards is complete.