I’m afraid it was through Instagram. A French collector won this eBay lot which was simply titled as ‘foreign Pokémon promos’ or something similarly vague for a couple hundred bucks, even though all combined I and multiple other collectors would have paid thousands for the lot. They sold all non-French rare cards to other collectors, like the German/Spanish Surfing/Flying Pikachu to a fellow Pikachu collector. The German birthday Pikachu they sold for ~100-150 euros to a German guy, and both me and a couple other German collectors contacted him about buying it soon after, which I ended up doing for 4.4k euros. Not a bad flip for the German guy, from 100 to 4400 euros overnight…
PS: I buy most my German cards through CardMarket, and sometimes through eBay.de. Although I’ve only seen the German Birthday Pikachu on eBay once, and it was for 90k euros… Not sure if it sold privately or was just there for attention tbh.
(images from pokewiki.de (German version), bulbapedia (Japanese version), my own card (English version), a cardmarket listing (French version) and the Italian image is from an ebay listing)
I don’t really know what this means for the release but I guess it suggests that the European promos were edited and printed at a different time?
whats interesting to me is why the English WOTC was zoomed in but all other releases are normal. The non-holo gold tail stamp was actually released before the English wotc holo, idk if something changed during production to distinguish the difference, they also changed the foreign copies to has galaxy holo foil instead of the original Cosmo holo as well.
Jumping on your comment about certain foreign WotC promos that are among the toughest cards to find.
One perfect example for that along with this German Birthday Pikachu is the French Psyduck promo 20. For a very long time we only knew one or two copies. The current number of known copies is ~6-7 which is still crazily low. One was in the ebay lot you talked about. One of the possible reasons given for this extreme scarcity is that the card was only released in Quebec and not in France
So interesting thing I just discovered about the German and French Birthday Pikachu, the seller of the French version I’m in contact with says he received it as a prize for finishing in 9th place at a French Championship Tournament in '99/'00. Said it was qualification for a World TCG Tourney in San Diego. This is the first and only time I’ve ever heard this. The only story I’ve heard in the past is it being released from Wotc in the mail the same way the US version was released. My PSA copy is also labeled like this mail giveaway. So I’m curious if this info he is providing is true. Thoughts?
Not sure if it sold privately or was just there for attention tbh.
