Advice on collecting EX Reverse Holos?

Hi All, I don’t post often but if anyone out there has dabbled in collecting EX Era reverse holos, I’d appreciate your take on the below!

Aggron is my favorite Gen 3 pokemon, so I’ve been working on collecting every EX card for its evolution line. Just seeking binder quality here with minimal visible scratching, not graded.

Problems I’ve encountered with the reverses thus far, particularly with Ruby&Sapphire, Sandstorm, and TM vs TA:

  1. Nobody grades these cards. In looking at the PSA pop report, the 13 Aron/Lairon/Aggron cards don’t have a single reverse holo TOTAL population over 8. Most of them have a pop of 4 or less. Therefore, either nobody is selling them because they’re in collections permanently OR the 1 seller I’ve seen is basically making up his own prices (far above what I’m willing to pay for a reverse common/uncommon)

  2. For these 3 sets in particular, the reverse foils themselves scratch if you breathe on them wrong. Raw market may be cheap - $3-15 per card - but the quality varies wildly.

QUESTIONS:
Are these problems with C/UC/R reverses common for all of EX Era (excluding gold stars and EX cards since interest for those is obviously way higher)?

Any collecting advice? It seems like I’m just gonna have to be both very patient and very attentive to the listings, and take some risks on whatever NM cards pop up in the hopes they’re solid binder quality.

TL:DR - EX Era reverses scratch easily and are seldom graded. Raw market is risky. Advice on collecting binder quality NM reverses?

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Those early ex sets are particularly hard to grade. Whenever I see a mint raw one I grab it no matter the card but I imagine it would be very hard to hunt a specific card. With grading costs up so high its tough to grade reverse holos economically as well. These reverse holos need to either go up in price to make it worth grading or grading prices need to drop (which they have never ever done outside of a short promo period). Ill keep my eyes open for aggron line cards for ya (lmk if you see any wailmers lol)

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The graded pop is more of a problem for the early Gen 3 sets. Plenty of the FRLG/TRR/etc. reverse holos have been graded because more people collect those. But yeah, there’s like next to nothing graded for the first four sets.

As far the fragile nature of the cards: that’s mainly just an issue for the first four sets since those are the only ones with that reverse holo pattern. But TRR and Deoxys also have extremely fragile reverse holos, but they’re fragile in a very different way.

First: I’m very sorry for the terribly sparse raw market. As stupid as it sounds, I’m largely responsible. Over the past 1.5 years, I’ve been putting together raw mint master sets of the first 10 EX Series sets (and have more or less finished them). And that involved my buying literally thousands of “NM” reverse holos (by thousands I mean many thousands – definitely 5000+, maybe significantly more). I bought basically the entire inventory off of TCGPlayer (though since I finished a few months ago, the supply has probably replenished a bit). For certain sets, I had to buy 20+ of certain cards just to find a single mint copy. I’ve since sold off most of my extras on eBay and to T&T (if you’ve bought any reverse holos on eBay, it’s very possible you’ve purchased from me since I’m one of the few people who sells NM ones on there). Completing these reverse sets is a royal pain in the ass and was a gigantic money sink. These sets are insanely scarce and the reverse holos are virtually impossible to find in raw mint condition. And the prices have gone up since then, so it’s even more of a money sink now. But it was 100% worth it because these sets are fucking gorgeous.

If you need any specific advice, I’d be happy to help. I’ve spent basically every waking hour of my free time over the past 1.5 years working on these sets (not to mention that I’m also pretty far through PSA 10/CGC 9.5 holo/ex sets, too – I have way too much EX lol. You can see my collection thread if you care to see 1% of what I have).

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Thank you both for the advice. Zorloth, I just had to laugh at your reply, I know you’re a big time collector but I never expected one person to be in no small way responsible for such a big market shortage!! LOL. Darn you…but also congrats on the impressive collection milestone.

Based on what’s been said, I think I will just take my time, grabbing up raw NM copies of the cards I want when they pop up and roll the dice! A $5-10 roll of the dice isn’t so awful.

Cheers.

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No problem :blush:. I doubt I’m solely responsible, but I have to imagine that my buying made a tangible impact on the market lol.

Best of luck with the sets! Great to see other people working on them.

i had complete some near complete of all the original nintendo sets up til b&w i sold and made few trades howver i have quite bit now those cards in rusty review video on new company are mine and there were about 30 ex cards in there nothing less then a 8 10s came in e series witch isnt surprise however pichu from emerald got 10 witch im skeptical on lol looks more 9ish 9.5 to me anyway if your interested i have lot ex deoxys and TA vs TM but i got randoms of all sets i pushed aside because subs are so large another card ends up trumping another at times IG catchem_all_tcg_collectables i dont care to whack on price ill even trade in situation where cards going somewhere and not reaching the market directly after thats what the market needs

Best of luck with your aggron hunt! Aggron is a fav of mine too and I feel your pain.

You can get lucky on ebay, I have had a lot of success this year with mint 2003 reverse holos all from the same source but I think they are all tapped out by now. it’s sort of a unicorn scenario but it’s the only way to get these cards Mint in a cost effective way so just be on the hunt for sellers who have mint cards from those eras generally.

You can also crack packs. Every pack has one, and print quality isn’t so bad. you can expect solidly mint cards out of the pack in my experience. It’s pricey, but you can buy “Light” packs since they have reverse holos too.

Grading will be more expensive and time consuming now but if they were cards I really cared about I’d shell out $20-30 for a 9-10.

You also mentioned expensive prices for Mint slabs on ebay. If you’re after the perfect 10, to be frank, it might be best to pay up. It will save you a lot of time and most likely money too.
If 9s are acceptable to you though, there is a lot of value there to be had for the price. To earn a 9, these reverses need to be just about as pack fresh as the 10s so tbh they are a lot more similar to 10s in terms of scarcity than compared to regular holos. If price is a factor, my advice is to adjust your scope. A psa 9 reverse R&S Aggron sold for ~75 on ebay recently, for example.

It was mentioned above but later EX era reverse holos will be *comparatively* easy to track down. some sets are harder than others though like EXD and TRR.

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