1st edition was regional?

is.it true 1st edition base in 1999 was released on the east coast only?.. I know it was a scarce set to begin with or whatever but was it really only distributed in select east coast states exclusively??

I wanted to start shaking down my friends in bold attempts to find a 1st edition zard by luck that way.lol… But I live in Missouri… So the chance of us having first edition as kids was probably impossible right?

I lived in Florida and there was no such thing as non-1st ed stamped packs for like the first 6 months of buying up pokemon. The starter decks were always shadowless though which was annoying. I never saw any unlimited until jungle/fossil was out.

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Just for fun… Lets say a hypothetical 20 friends who grew up in the midwest all have old binders that of which contain 2 charizards in each. Making 40 zards total… whats the probability at least one would be a 1st edition?

Just curious how rare it actually was to a kid a 99

Anecdotal of course but I’m from NYC and I only had one 1st ed pack as a kid (and my brother had 0) but a significant amount of shadowless

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Interesting you remember that detail!! I didnt know the difference between the base sets back then being that the art was the same.

Did you know that 1st edition was rare when you had it back then?

I did know 1st ed was special…but I had no idea about shadowless until I got back into pokemon in 2018 lol I knew the colors were kinda different when I was kid but not that the sets were different

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I’m pretty sure we didn’t get 1st Edition Base here in Minnesota. I traded and battled with a lot of people during the WOTC era but in all that time I only saw a few of those cards. We did get shadowless here, but I don’t think I ever opened any of those packs either.

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Grew up in Kansas City - found my old collection within the last year and had 100s of holos from base jungle and fossil, with plenty of jungle and fossil 1st editions, zero shadowless let alone 1st edition base.

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1st Ed base was mainly limited to the coasts. Shadowless was a bit more spread out but still scarce. I didn’t see any 1st Ed growing up, and could count the few shadowless in my area.

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1st edition Base wasn’t exclusive to any particular area but was more available along the West coast, USA, than anywhere else, in my experience.

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I had some first editions in my childhood collection and I grew up in Houston, TX. I also bought a couple first editions off a gentlemen from the greater Houston area.

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I grew up in Atlanta Georgia and I can remember seeing 1st edition blisters right when the craze was absolutely insane.

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Just to throw a monkey in the mix. Back in 1999 my son bought 1st ed Base packs from our local 7-11 store up here in Ontario Canada. We didn’t know a thing about Pokemon. Like what’s this edition 1 mean on the cards.

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The West and East coast got most of it. The Midwest and South probably got very little if any allocation.

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Yeah thought so I grew up in st louis right around you and played with base set 2 mostly if I recall correctly

Did you recognize shadowless as its own set even back then??

“Dont give Missouri anything good just send them 5 million machamps”

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Ohio here. The first 1st edition set I can remember on the shelves was Rocket.

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I’m from Long Island, New York and we had 1st edition base here

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I was in Manhattan - I had one 1st edition base card in my binder, a magnemite which is the most destroyed card in my childhood collection haha. My friend when I was a kid told me it was special and I remember that. I think he had maybe 2-3 1st base cards (we all only had commons/uncommons I think). No idea where I got it but I guess in a trade. I got into pokemon before the TCG came out, in christmas of '98, so I think I wouldn’t have been THAT late to the game, yet near to no 1st edition base.

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Same, and same. Columbus area, in particular.

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