Do you collect more English or Japanese cards? [Poll]

General
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After asking mods for permission, I have created a poll to find out what our efour members prefer to collect!
Feel free to comment here to provide more information, for example if you collect specific cards in a certain language or why you collect cards in a certain language.

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My scope of collection is 1999-2011 English cards. I will buy Japanese if the art is exclusive or as a backup for retired competitive TCG formats. I also split my work between America and Japan so I’m an opportunist when it comes to buying Japanese cards.

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99% english

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I’m the first person to have voted for “It’s pretty even”. There are 71 Japanese cards and 65 English cards featuring Pichu and I have 58 and 60 of them respectively.

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Thanks for the poll. I mostly collect only Japanese as it was a cheap entry point when I rejoined the hobby. Due to my lack of knowledge I wanted something fulfilling without breaking the bank. Now my focus lies on Japanese promos and other exclusives. I don’t actively look for English cards and only have a few which were great deals in my opinion.

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Depends! My binders are probably 60-40 Japanese-English. My graded are probably 80%+ English!

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Nice I will try the poll, but overall 50-50

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60/40 percent split between English/Japanese but that’s only because those are the numbers for Gyarados in English/Japanese. I chose English and Japanese because when I was a kid, both English and Japanese packs were available at my local stores.

If I started over as a collector, I probably would focus only on Japanese unless there were exclusives in other languages.

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9

From a numerical standpoint it’s much more English than Japanese but that comes down to my collecting method. I exclusively collect English for my binders and almost exclusively collect Japanese for my slabs for several reasons (cost, artwork, display appeal). I find it really works for me, I have fun perusing my English binders but I find that I enjoy Japanese slabs much more than English.

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10

I collect a mix of both. However I think I have a strong preference for Japanese cards, especially the higher end cards.

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11

50% Japanese, 50% “foreign” :wink:

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Mainly Japanese binder and English graded

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Started collecting mostly English again back in 2015, until
I joined E4. After I had spent some time exploring the fourum I rapidly transitioned into a Japanese TCG collector. Now that we’re here, thank you to everyone in UPCCC/E4 for educating each other and opening new horizons for the hobby.

Japanese is superior.

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Keep an eye during the winter time, exclusive promotions happen around that time.

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Mainly Japanese but have been venturing in some Thai, Korean, and Chinese cards.

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I answered 50/50 in the poll, but since I was curious I added some formulas to my total collection Excel and see exactly how many non-duplicated cards I have per language:

All TCG cards combined: 11834

English: 2969
Japanese: 4109
Dutch: 95
German: 778
French: 495
Italian: 494
Spanish: 565
Portuguese: 252
Korean: 1369
Chinese: 360
Polish: 10
Russian: 27
Thai: 245
Indonesian: 66

So in terms of percentages:

English: 25.1%
Japanese: 34.7%
Other: 40.2%

Japanese at one isn’t too surprising, since I once bought a lot of 7,000 non-Holo cards (~2.75k unique, ~4.25k duplicates) for 100 bucks. Korean also isn’t too surprising, since I usually buy an entire booster box for 15-20 USD when I only need a single Common or Holofoil from the set.
The only one that surprises me is Spanish tbh, since I’ve never opened any Spanish booster boxes and maybe one or two packs, and for Pikachu/Seviper, there are less Spanish cards than German, French, and Italian. This amount most likely has to do with all the free cards Spanish sellers usually include with my orders (usually a single opened booster pack minus the holo, so 8 or 9 cards). :grin:

Greetz,
Quuador

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For now, I am in the mostly English with a few Japanese cards camp. The only Japanese cards I collect are:

  • the no rarity base set which I view as historically significant to the hobby. If that set didn’t exist I would collect regular Japanese base set for that same reason. It’s the original version of what we all know and love
  • Recently, as of last week, the alternate art versions of set cards that were banned in the USA like Misty’s Tears, base set Jynx, etc. to me these tie into my set collections in a nice way. But there are not many of these cards, less than 20

I personally have a hard time with the Japanese text which of course I can’t remotely comprehend.

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Japanese all the way, but then again the majority of what I personally collect are cards that don’t have an English version.

I have to say though that I find the Japanese borders more aesthetically pleasing, so even if they were available in English, I might still go with the Japanese version.

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English, as i like to be able to read my cards.

But if i really like the artwork and it only has a Japan release, i will obviously go with Japanese

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Thanks for doing this poll. I’ve actually been very curious about this for a long time!

1 Like