Over the past few months. I’ve noticed that first the 1st PSA 9 Holos across the board supply became limited and then prives shot up across. 1st PSA 10 then followed especially base set and the promos and select pokemon specific cards
like charmander, squirtle and bulbasaur.
And while everything has increased in price. The 1st edition PSA 10 in general lag but right now seems like supply is starting to diminish as well and prices has increase a tad recently.
Just what I noticed and my feel of the market. Anyone feel the same about it or anything to add to the observation?
The PSA 10 1st ed non-holos have definitely been on the rise. Not seeing any commons that are selling for under $100 anymore. And many of the uncommons and non-holo Rares have been selling in the mid-hundreds.
And yeah the starters have grown a lot. A couple of days ago I know there was a private sale of the starter trio (Bulbasaur/Charmander/Squirtle) for $2.6k. And the last publicly sold Red Cheeks Pikachu went for $2.4k. The Yellow Cheeks is creeping up towards $1k as well.
I’d say the yellow cheeks is already at 1000 USD. There’s a Charmander right now that’s bid up to 1000 USD at the moment with 3 days left on the auction.
Ratio wise, the meat and potatoes as you call it hasn’t gone up as much despite it all being at least over 100.
I remember just last year your standard 1st edition PSA 10 Base Set common was going for like $65 bucks and the trios were only like around $175. (Around a 3 to 1 ratio.
And now the Trio are like 1000 bucks and your standard common at maybe say 110. That’s like a (9 to 1 ratio now). If your average common was to play catchup, they would be around 300 bucks a pop.
I don’t know about 300 buck but maybe easily around 200 at some point? But who knows, I never expected this fast of a price increase to begin with.
A wise pokemon collector (smpratte) predicted in a video last year that the 1st ed Base common PSA 10 cards will soon be over a $100 each. He was grabbing them whenever he could. Someone also wise (me ) completed his 1st ed PSA 10 common set last year. Thank you Scott!
Nice one haha, although I hear that joke quite often. Is is common for dutchies to eat aardappelen groente vlees, which translates to potatoes vegetables meat. That is why I said that. I don’t like aardappelen groente vlees, most of the time it is cooked potatoes and cooked veggies (1 species) and a piece of meat. It is a low effort meal but it also is not too appetising.
The PSA 9/10 starters have definitely been on the rise, especially Charmander. The PSA 10 Charmander is well over 1k at this point and the last few public sales of PSA 9 copies have been hovering around $500.
To be fair though, a lot of these were actually quite sluggish in their movement compared to most of the rest of the vintage market and the fact is that only now are some of these cards like the dugtrio 1st edition psa 10 for example actually getting back to the price they were selling for in 2017! Getting only 20-100 percent return on your investment over the past 6 months is actually bad right now in the pokemon market which is hilarious. Some specific cards within the set are seriously moving a lot more than that 100 percent though like anything related to the starters and the Pikachu’s and some of the commons and uncommons too, the movement is pretty erratic overall. There appears to be buyouts happening on some of the cards by the way the market activity looks, particularly on that charmander card. Will be interesting to see how everything settles.
Buying non-holo rares, commons and uncommons in 1st edition psa 10 has actually been a very poor investment overall over the past few years, as compared to most of the rest of the vintage market. If you had put that money into any of the 1st edition holo’s all the way from jungle to eseries, or some of the favorite Japanese play, masaki or fan club cards, you would have made much more money. Although I think that might change in the future and that these may end up being just as good of a long term investment. I know that I love these cards and have been adding to my position in them over the past 6 months as other cards started to rise and these did not.
Those who recognized that cards like the Neo and e-series cards were extremely undervalued prior to this year have had a major payoff - as you say, much more so in the last couple of years than Base Set had. Kudos to the people who recognized how undervalued these cards had been.
But at a certain point, you have to ask yourself if those cards reached a certain price level that Base Set starts to look like a better investment option relatively speaking. I think a lot of people asked themselves exactly that, and in the last couple of months we have seen Base Set starting to rise in a major way.
To toot my own horn this is exactly what I have done, and when the other sets went up a lot I switched back to the base set and the e series right before they went up also. The order has been Gym challenge moved first, then jungle and fossil, then rocket and gym heroes and the Neo’s, then e series and now finally 1st edition base is starting to catch up. Being able to see and predict this and continually buy the next thing to move before or right after it started to move was how I have been able to maximize the value of my collection over the past few years. The problem with base set 1st edition is that there is a decent amount of it compared to something like alpha in magic. MTG has a clear pecking order cause not only was it the first and most historic it was also by far the least printed. I don’t think that base set 1st edition will ever be eclipsed in value by another set but I do think that people comparing it to alpha are making a mistake, as not only are there probably more 1st edition base cards than gem mint Neo 1st cards in the world, but many of the most popular pokemon are also not in base set 1st edition, unlike in MTG where all the power nine were in alpha. I always suspected the lugia, ho oh, tyranitar, espeon and umbreon and the legendary dogs, would pull those sets up very quickly eventually. It will be interesting if one day some of the hardest to grade even ever eclipse the charizard. It will be tough and probably very unlikely given the price history and charizards identity in the hobby, but the lugia and t17 are quite interesting contenders to outgrow the charizard over time even if they never reach its price, they certainly have done much, much better in the last 6 months by percentage growth, we are talking more than 1000 percent growth for lugia vs probably around 50-80 percent growth at best for the charizard psa 10 so far. Which is a staggering difference.
I feel like anything that is more scarce and limited from the WOTC era will appreciate in value over time. I always buy any shadowless or first edition lots that I come across for a decent price to build up my inventory for the future when the cards become harder and harder to find. I’m more curious to see if at some point the unlimited common and uncommons from the WOTC era increase to these kind of prices in the future when first edition and shadowless become too expensive
Which is why I always was undecided on weather or not to get rid of my WOTC pack fresh bulk and reinvest that money into better cards or just keep it just in case I need to grade a bunch of these cards in the future
@jacobm9 , I don’t want to get into a whole thing about it because it’s nothing that hasn’t been said before, but even with a higher population I don’t think you can remotely compare the popularity of Base Set (both when it came out and now) to any other set. I get that the scarcity of 1st edition Base Set can’t compare with Alpha, but why does it have to? Yes, people have options to get lower grades at more reasonable prices (although those are rising too), but I don’t think there’s going to be enough cards in high grades to satiate the appetite for people who want Mint / Gem Mint sets. One of the most important trends continues to be how few Gem Mints have been added to the population in the last couple of years.
In any case, if we’re talking about all of this stuff strictly from an investment standpoint, there’s never going to be one set that yields the best returns for every given period of time. So again I say kudos to you for paying attention to trends, trusting your own judgment, and capitalizing.
I definitely agree with you that it is the most popular set of any set both then and now and overwhelming likely in the future. But that is also partially why it didn’t go as under the radar and unnoticed as alpha, and is why alpha was printed so much less. Alpha is I would argue equally if not more popular than base set 1st edition compared to the other magic sets particularly compared to anything remotely modern which isn’t even graded at all. The point being that in pokemon base set 1st edition has to compete with many more excellent historic and popular sets and even modern sets for people’s attention and money than a set like alpha does. I happen to think pokemon is much more popular than Magic the Gathering and will likely be a much better investment in the long run but that is a whole other discussion, but also a fun one and super speculative.
) completed his 1st ed PSA 10 common set last year. Thank you Scott!