I was watching and bidding on this listing but as the timer wound down things got weird. Price wasn’t adjusting so I refreshed the page and the price had skyrocketed to 800k yen.
How do you guys tell if there is still bidding going on?
Of course, I’m very salty about this so my rant here is biased towards the frustration spectrum. I was expecting maybe at most like 200k price based on other things I had watched recently that sold around that price for similar quantities of cards but mixed sets. Albeit still like 30ish emerald cards. But this is absolutely outrageous. I know how rare the cards are in the current market as I’ve been looking for em and can’t find squat. But really? 900k for them and it’s not even complete. That’s like 11,000 yen per card.
Please help ease my pain and tell me this is shill bidding
What I suspect though is that the only answer is to wait and see if the item gets relisted which would indicate lack of payment and therefore something fishy. Either way, I’m open to learning something. Thanks for reading my salty rant
I can’t see the bid history without a YJ account, but 900k Japanese Yen (~6.5k USD) does sound extremely high for this auction, even though I know the Emerald Battle-e cards are pretty dang rare.
(I’ve been looking for those nine - or just two featuring Seviper - Battle Frontier cards for a long while without much luck).
But I dunno. Maybe it’s shilled, or maybe the buyer knows something we don’t. Can’t do much about it either way.
Does Y!J show if something was paid for? I’ve seen many of these auctions hit all time highs and get relisted in the next week. Maybe the sale won’t go through and it will come up again!?
@quuador Here is the bid history, but it doesn’t show much. Just shows the primary jumps is all. Doesn’t show the process of bids that got up to the price change. I watched it for example at the end and it went up in tiny increments every second or two until the final price. Also, I had a guess you might’ve wanted those too, I just figured you already had em.
@smokemon I’m just praying it gets relisted. It’s one thing to lose an auction, but for the price to immediately wipe all chances of ever completing the set because the price for singles now has insane precedent to go up. Boy does that make me sad and frustrated
So you think it might be foul play? As in he bid his own item up and then is just relisting so people have a price reference now? I think we will know for sure when my comment is either deleted or answered honestly.
The YJP auction looks suspecious, if you look into detailed bid history you will see that the 15-feedback bidder keeps lifting the bid manually while the 5K-ish bidder just outbids the other bidder through automatic bidding. This usually represents two scenarios:
Both bidders really want the set with the 5K-ish bidder has a way higher budget than the 15-feedback bidder, so the 15-feedback bidder gradually offers higher bids, getting outbid and repeat. However this doesn’t look likely as the competition was within 3 minutes which means the 15-feedback bidder didn’t even spend time to hesitate to offer the next bid.
The 5K-ish bidder was Buyee, and the 15-feedback bidder was a shiller trying to figure out the highest bid of the bidder behind Buyee.
As for the Mercari listing, it’s a separate listing because they don’t even have the same set of Gold cards. Gold cards refer to cards #57 to #64 in the set which was rumored to have only 1 pulled from 10 packs, and thus are the major blockers of completing this set. To be honest if the Mercari listing wasn’t asking for a ridiculous price I might just buy and complete that set since that set is way easier to complete than the YJP set.
Finally for @pigeonsyndicate 's offers, unfortunately I don’t think you’ll be able to get either sets with your offers due to how the Gold cards are being sought after right now. You need to at least double them.
I don’t really know too much about these cards to be honest. I only know what I’ve been seeing for pricing in the last year or so. So if you think my price is out of line, then I guess I’ve got no shot hahaha! Oh well, as is life I guess
You’re correct though, they are two different sets. I saw that three cards were missing and didn’t bother to cross reference those together. They’re totally different though.
So the good ones are actually quite a bit rarer than the others. Is there a guide for these on eFour anywhere? I’d love to either be part of making one if there isn’t. Are there any other aspects to these that I should be aware of in terms of scarcity and whatnot?
Not sure what your collection goal was so I’ll focus on the Emerald set only.
Emerald set overall goes higher than other sets due to:
Emerald and FRLG packs are random packs. In contrast, RS and Colosseum packs guarantee to form the full set by getting all different-colored packs.
Emerald has a larger set with 64 battle cards and 19 map cards.
Emerald was released the latest. In the e-reader era, later sets including Emerald and Battle Network 5/6 were less produced due to the lack of popularity of e-readers, and thus are now in high demand by completionists.
The 64 battle cards in the set has either Bronze, Copper, Silver or Gold background. While the other 3 were intertwined in the card list and didn’t show any difference in terms of pull rates, Gold cards were all assigned to the last slots in the list (A057 to A064) and considerably harder to pull, which made completing them the holy grail of the set. Their price fluctuates as supply and demand changes frequently (imagine if multiple collectors all need the same card to complete their sets), but personally I would keep a $400 budget per card in case one suddenly shows up.
If you want to collect the set, I would recommend the following steps:
Find cheap bundles without the Gold cards to gain coverage
Once you’re down to a certain non-Golds left, start looking for singles or cheap bundles which include the missing cards
For bundles with Golds, focus on the Golds and think if it’s worth it for you to “pay the price just for those Golds”
Yeah I have already completed RS 1+2, Colosseum, and FRLG (3 cards left, can buy immediately just deciding if I want to buy a big lot that includes them or a small one that s 1/3 of the price)
Emerald is the last set I need to find. I hadn’t really looked for much info on it since I figured it was similar to FRLG. I opened the RS sets on my own so I knew they were all pre determined with the pack color. Colosseum I knew as well.
Since FRLG and emerald were both random I figured they’d be similar. But FRLG doesn’t seem to have much difference in the rarity of each card. They all tend to have the same rates as far as I can tell. Just comes down to if you’ve got the luck to pull all of em without doubles. Didn’t realize emerald took it to the true TCG route of including an actual level of rarity to the set.
And as a final mail in my coffin, someone offered 600,000 yen for the Mercari listing so yeah, the price is clearly not too insane.
Thank you very much for giving me the info.
Do you know much about the N promos for RS or FRLG? A set of each is available on Mercari at the moment but they’re incredibly high priced and I can’t afford em. I’m not too worried about it but curious of how rare they actually are.
Thanks again very much! I really appreciate the knowledge you shared!
Yeah Emerald is way harder to collect than FRLG due to all the reasons I mentioned plus the existence of Gold cards. FRLG doesn’t have cards that are particularly hard to pull.
600K still seems high for set with 5 out of 8 Golds, but I’ve seen some e-reader collectors (not only Pokémon but also other titles like Mega Man and F-ZERO) desperately wishing to complete their sets and ended up paying extraordinary prices to get the last card, so might be the same case.
The N packs are only available by trading in 80 points in Club Nintendo, Nintendo’s royalty program similar to My Nintendo but during the GBA/GC era. 80 points wasn’t a big deal, but most people would just save more points for better prizes like GC memory card or even Wavebird Controllers so it wasn’t like a lot of people traded for those either. They’re like the TCG’s e Era - no rise of demands until production stopped.
BTW I had a N card clamped by PSA during reholder, whose grade ended up dropping from 10 to 4. That was a really painful experience.
Can’t do much about it either way.
Hoping that it comes back to auction for you. 
