An update!
I finished my reverse Expedition set earlier this year but was too lazy to update for some time 
Luckily for me, I had completed a good chunk of the set by mid-to-late 2025, before Expedition cards rose in price. I was also lucky to have picked up a lot of the more popular cards/pokemon earlier, so I was able to complete the set on a budget I was comfortable with.
I’m sure many others can relate in the current environment, but it feels a bit odd how much these cards have rose in price. In the beginning, I chose to complete Expedition (instead of Aquapolis or Skyridge) because it was the cheapest of the WotC e-reader sets and seemed pretty manageable price-wise. If I were to have considered building this set around mid-2025, I just would never have started. I sold an extra reverse holo Charmander I had earlier this year, and that one sale covered my original cost basis for a NM reverse holo Gengar, Cubone, etc. combined. That felt like a bit of a weird situation.
Let’s begin with a semi-record of the cards in the order I received them, which I intended to do in the beginning as a fun way to preserve the journey. Things ultimately got a bit out of order since I kept a few slabs for cracking out just at the end, and I had actually picked up the holo energies as a full set sometime in the middle but just hadn’t dug them out until the end. Yes, that’s right. Holo energies. At some point, I thought that the non-holo energies (to complete the set) would not partner well with all the reverse holos, so I considered switching them out for the Japanese-exclusive McDonald holo e-reader energies. A small back-and-forth with @mthursty (who did the same with their Expedition set, if I recall correctly) cinched the decision.
Some random stories from when I was building the set:
· One of the Blastoises was listed by someone that had just found their childhood collection and was just selling off the cards. When the package was delivered, I found out the guy had just thrown the card (in a toploader) into a bubble mailer and mailed it off as is—without sealing the bubble mailer. I was lucky to have even received the card in the end.
· When I won the Pokemon Reversal in an auction on Ebay, I received the card literally the evening the same day. It turns out the person was very local (just a few blocks away) and had decided to hand deliver it. I chatted with him a bit and found out he was selling his childhood cards, and I ended up purchasing one of the Charizards, Feraligatrs, and Meganiums from him.
· When I was focused a bit on finding the Charmeleon, basically no new ones were being listed on Ebay. I ended up thinking maybe I might have better luck finding one abroad and happened to find a seller with a couple English reverses I needed on German Ebay and sourced my cards from there. Just seemed a bit weird to feel compelled to search internationally for the English card.
Here’s the record of the collection journey:
There it is, all 165 cards in the set. Or… not?
When I was building the set, I chose not to use any checklists, since I don’t tend to collect in that manner. I was buying cards based on my memory of what cards I was missing and occasional crosschecking with what I had. When I got down to the last 20-25 cards, I finally decided to make a dedicated list to be able to focus my marketplace searches. I set up Ebay saved searches, refreshed TCGPlayer daily (which got me a couple wins), etc. When my binder slots hit 165, I considered everything complete, took the above pictures, and started removing all the cards from the binder to put in their final display organization. Not too far into my binder rebuildling, I was thrown off. I had a huge pile of the cards semi-organized into Kanto, Johto, and Trainers, but I just couldn’t find one card.
I dug through all the cards again and eventually found out I had one duplicate card—which meant one was also missing. Tragic. But an easy to fix mistake. I had to pay double what the card might have run me in 2024, but it wasn’t a terribly expensive card. The complete photoshoot had to be put off until the final card arrived.
Those with an astute eye might have noticed which card I had a duplicate of:
I had a duplicate of Chikorita 99 and was missing Pidgeot 59. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t mess more up, given the many duplicate-art reverse holos in the set and my building the set from mostly memory.
In the end, I decided to organize the pokemon in pokedex order, since organizing by set number seemed criminal due to a number of the evolution lines being illustrated by the same artist. Trainer cards were much more loosely organized, with cards that included characters organized first, and then kind of whatever. I would really like to keep evolution lines on the same page, but there are a lot of weird numbers to balance, due to the duplicate-art rares.
Anyways, here’s the set as it currently sits in my binder:
It was enjoyable putting together the whole set. I’d probably like to complete another eventually, likely a mid-era set. But since a lot of cards have risen in price quite a bit, I’m not in a hurry to start. At the moment, I’m considering of one of the early EX-era sets, likely EX Sandstorm or EX Dragon. I don’t even know the complete set lists, so I’m not sure what the more expensive cards in the sets are, so hopefully I don’t get destroyed going into one of those. I also likely won’t complete it in full reverse holo (which I would have preferred), given the price increases.
I am also extremely behind updating on my species collection stuff, but that’ll have to wait until another time (since a lot of that still needs to be semi-organized )