Chrispy's Collection Thread

Hey guys, been on e4 or a little while now and thought it might be cool to create a collection thread to track my progress. First up is this incredible Spearow from Jungle set. As some of you know, Jungle only had 48 cards in the Japanese set (which came out in 1997) but a healthy 64 cards in English set (which came out in 1999 - so this card is aproximately 23 years old!). Spearow’s name comes from a combination of “Spear” and “Sparrow” due to the way it charges it’s prey in large groups. It’s natural predator is Ekans (Snake spelt backwards). Art from this Jungle Spearow was created by the very talented Mitsuhiro Arita who has contributed a lot of the illustrations for Final Fantasy XI and has done some freelance pokemon illustrations in the past as well.

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More plz

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Great start to a promising collection! One of the few cards that features “real” non-Pokemon animals.

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Another Spearow post? Can people be a little bit more creative with their collections?

Every virus collector and their mother is buying up Spearows all fucking day. We get it, it’s a popular card. But maybe try to have a little originality and explore the space a little bit more before making big purchases like these.

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This is pure gold. I love the write up.

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I had never at all noticed that he was classed as a ‘tiny bird’ pokemon.

Equally, I note that Pidgey base was also considered a umm tiny bird pokemon. If you will excuse the slight tangent, this google searching also taught me that Pidgeot (a bird pokemon, not a tiny bird) wasn’t in the base set with pidgey and pidgeotto and that the evolution line was over 2 sets, unlike the aforementioned spearow who gets fearow in Jungle. Learn so much every day XD

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So I’m just gonna throw up a card here and there on wednesdays that I’m pretty happy with having added to my collection. This one is the 2007 Spring Battle Road Bebe’s Search prize card, illustrated by Ken Sugimori.

Bebe (Mizuki in Japanese), is more or less a forgotten waifu character in Pokemon. She only really got one card - a japanese nonholo and english crosshatch reverse set card in the Secret Wonders release. Bebe was introduced as a computer technitian that lived in Hearthrome City in Sinnoh. She was responsible for creating the Pokemon Storage System that succeeded Lanette’s Storage System.

The holo version seen here only exists as a promo prize card that was awarded in a PCL Corner Battle event at the 2007 Spring Battle Road tournament that took place between March and April.

I’ve been watching the PSA pop reports on this card for years and it’s been a slow crawl with 13 PSA 10s and 5 PSA 9s. For it’s extreme rarity, there are suprisingly several still up on japanese websites like Mercari (raw) in the $1200-1800 range which I fully expect to dry up over the next year or so when people start figuring out how rare it is. While popularity can always lead to scarcity due to demand, rarity somehow always eventually finds it’s collectors audience/appeal and doesn’t need as much good company to stay gone for good. Anyone else in here owning a Bebe’s Search? Holla atcha ganggang.

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Very cool, thanks for sharing that! I had never seen that card before. Really love the composition in this one.

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Yeah Ken Sugimori (the artist) always delivered absolute bangers.

So I missed two Wednesdays in a row of trying to get a collection thread going but I owed @gaano a little writeup about WCP Unlimited and Spring Battle Road 2008.

First up is Cynthia from Spring Battle Road 2008. Here is mine:

So why is this card so rare, about as rare as Miracle Diamond and some other trophies from the time? The answer is because the tournament was largely cancelled in it’s entirety due to bomb threats. Pardon the Japanese to English translation but I figured this would go a little further than posting the original Japanese files. I’ll link one of the articles in Japanese here though: pokeboon.com/jp/promo_event/battle-road-spring-2008/


Miracle Diamond Writeup:

So there’s a lot to digest above and feel free to do so but the important bits of information here are as follows: the event was to take place across 5 venues. Three of those venues never had a single day of tournament play and two of those venues were cut short and cancelled.

Two important things to notice in the above are as follows:

Under “Conditions” and “Presentation” scheduling you’ll notice a sales corner where it says World Champions Pack Tokubetsu was available for purchase. This is where you could purchase the very rare Unlimited World Champions Packs. I think we’ve already fleshed out why those packs were created in Japanese in anticipation for worlds but if anyone needs me to type something out on that later, I can.

Next is under “Tournament” you’ll see two major prize cards: Sinora’s Thoughts (English translation is Cynthia’s Feelings), and Miracle Diamond. Miracle Diamond was supposed to be the biggest card you could win - the trophy. There are likely 90 of them (Miracle Diamonds) in the world - but most of them that were awarded came from 2007’s Spring Battle Road and only a handful were earned in 2008. Unlike the Diamond, Cynthia was only awarded in 2008 which is why this card is extremely hard to come by.

Here are two up in Japan right now and the price reflects similar price points to what’s avail on Ebay:

jp.mercari.com/item/m58203234446
jp.mercari.com/item/m65576102399

In any case, I had more than one of these Cynthias that I bought prior to the prices catching up to the rarity as more collectors begin to dig into prize and trophy cards. I had no such luck finding an Unlimited WCP though, so when the opportunity arose to own one of two copies of the Unlimited WCP Charizard in a PSA 10, I decided to trade my Cynthia in the worst shape for the Zard. I believe that Cynthia ended up being a PSA7 or CGC 6.5, you’d have to ask @masonkampe . In any case, I ended up dropping as much money as I could at the time to pry the second copy of Unlimited WCP Zard in hopes that I could own the entire “market”. Shortly later, @augustdifirenze managed to grade a PSA 10 and the population went to 3. Another member here, @thecharizardauthorty eventually bought that copy so the two of us were the only zard holders of this card in a 10. Now, there is a 4th and it is a pop 4 card, but who knows, I’m sure a few more may eventually pop up. Either way, it’s hella rare/scarce and I’m very happy to own half of the population of PSA 10 Unlimited WCP Zards, as well as a couple mint copies of Cynthias feelings.

www.psacard.com/pop/tcg-cards/2008/pokemon-japanese-promo/96772

Regarding the Cynthia PSA POP- I know that the 9 grades were cracked and resubmitted a few times which makes the total PSA pop actually lower, but this card has some beckett grades floating around that I’ve linked above. All in all, maybe 19-25 Cynthias have managed to be graded in total with a pop 11 at PSA10.

www.psacard.com/pop/tcg-cards/2007/pokemon-japanese-world-champions-pack/105769

Regarding the Unlimited WCP Zard - the total PSA pop is 8 (4 psa 10) and I don’t think any have been graded with Beckett, though a couple were graded with CGC last year by another member.

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Very interesting post ! :blush:
So yes for UED WCP, that’s basically what we said. I saw this website with all the information about the cancellation and I used it to source my information when I modified the WCP bulbapedia page several months ago (at the bottom, I added information about UED WCP rarity) but I was not sure about the fact that the first two venues only had one or two days.
I knew you had these two Charizards, that’s crazy and I am pretty sure they come from the sale in August, 2020 (10 unopened packs + 15 opened) that’s it ?

I wish we had more information about UED WCP, pictures of a booster box, and I also wish we see more UED WCP packs for sale. Because with mine, I only know a handful of UED WCP booster packs.

Congrats for your Cynthia card, that’s crazy how an incident led to the extreme rarity of some cards and items.

Missed the tag, loving your thread.

Such a great card!

Lazy post. I had a cool imgur album with all my charizards from 1998 to now but somehow that was deleted and all the photos scattered. So, I figured I’d just post a pic of a few of my favs for now.

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Cool stuff Chrispy, hope youre well!

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Thanks Muddy. Very comfortable and doing a lot better than several friends over in Eastern Europe if you know what I mean. So def can’t complain. Will try to be more active on the forum in the coming weeks.

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Happy to see you are active here, hope to see you on discord again soon.

Chris B i have to say that is such a sweet opening :blush:

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Quite happy with the forums as always. When the discord mods understand the difference between politics (which are against the rules for being polarizing and argumentative), and the simple mentioning of current events such as one country invading another (or ABOUT to - which was what I had mentioned in it’s relationship to the economy and luxury items at the time), then maybe I’ll rejoin.

I don’t think that will be any time soon though unfortunately.

Appreciate you. I’ll be updating this collection thread again soon :]

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