How rare is vending series?

[benjolmes]

@churlocker

My opinion:

Vending doesn’t have quite as much out there still sealed and accessible to the market as we have enjoyed through eBay the last 5+ years.

The value on an unpeeled set is insanely low right now. You can enjoy a totally unique opening experience for a few hundred bucks that yields you a ton of totally unique and exclusive artworks.

I highly recommend people interested in the set have fun while they still can. Buy a series 3 set or, if ~$1200 is in the budget, grab all of 1-3 and just make a night of peeling them. With a friend if you can. It’s a blast and a half and the cost per card is so low that it’s impossible to lose money. This won’t last forever and it’s exactly the kind of thing that people kick themselves for not doing earlier.

A year or two ago I did this and it was the highlight of collecting for me so far!

[octaane]

Question about the vending series sheets that I’ve never really seen answered online - say you have all sheets from vending series 1. Does that mean you have the full set from vending series 1, or would you need to peel multiple sheets, just like you need to open many packs, because you don’t know what cards you’re going to get?

[muk]

@octaane

Question about the vending series sheets that I’ve never really seen answered online - say you have all sheets from vending series 1. Does that mean you have the full set from vending series 1, or would you need to peel multiple sheets, just like you need to open many packs, because you don’t know what cards you’re going to get?

The sheets are numbered and you know exactly which cards are on the respective sheet.
You can see what sheet has which card on the bulbapedia page: bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Vending_Machine_cards_%28TCG%29

Each series consists of 18 sheets. The sheets each contain two fixed commons and one fixed uncommon (+one fixed special or ‘spoof’ card in series 3, like Ooyama’s Pikachu). A full sheet set #1 - #18 will get you a full card set with one of each uncommon and two of each common.

[KingPokemon]

@churlocker

My opinion:

Vending doesn’t have quite as much out there still sealed and accessible to the market as we have enjoyed through eBay the last 5+ years.

The value on an unpeeled set is insanely low right now. You can enjoy a totally unique opening experience for a few hundred bucks that yields you a ton of totally unique and exclusive artworks.

I highly recommend people interested in the set have fun while they still can. Buy a series 3 set or, if ~$1200 is in the budget, grab all of 1-3 and just make a night of peeling them. With a friend if you can. It’s a blast and a half and the cost per card is so low that it’s impossible to lose money. This won’t last forever and it’s exactly the kind of thing that people kick themselves for not doing earlier.

Bingo. Very well put and excellent advice:)

[drago]

A fantastic set indeed!

Gorgeous artworks, and probably something you have never seen before if you stuck to the US (or European) released set.

The Masaki promos are said to have a count of 21,000 (for Omastar) to 39,000 (Alakazam) (link: here), so you can extrapolate that in theory for all these cards to be claimed it would take 147,000 Bill’s PC cards to be collected. These could be found in the first release of vending series 3 which as far as I know is definitely rarer than the second release (with Imakuni’s PC instead), so I would say an educated guess would put numbers anywhere between 500,000 and 5,000,000 I guess (shot in the dark for the upper number, I don’t think there’s data supporting anything precise).

However out of these possible 147,000 only 1385 have been graded by PSA (link). Given their popularity, I’d say thatreflects on the proportion that made it to our age!

Edit: forgot to say that I did exactly what @funmonkey54 suggested for the Series I and I could not agree more! For the price of a couple booster packs of any japanese Wizards series you get an amazing and funky experience, with a guaranteed complete set of obscure but amazing artworks! Vending series II will be my advent calendar for this year!

[ucfjag]

Regardless of rarity, vending had some of the most amazing artwork, and most are still affordable today!

[firebirder31]

Does anybody know what the distribution is on the sealed 100 pack sheets and the sealed 50 pack sheets? It can’t be an even number of each of the 18 sheets so is it random which sheets you get, do you get more of like sheet 12 than 2 for example?

Mostly asking about series 3. Thanks!

[pikap]

I really like this set and would love to open it myself but with the recent pokemon boom, ebay sellers have become nuts atm… I’m not paying 6k… link

[BugCatcherDave]

Mmm Masaki

[jonathangaib]

Anyone want to share their opinion of what they think a respectable price/offer price would be in today’s market, for a complete, unpeeled set of all three?

[fourthstartcg]

@jonathangaib, Posts in threads with a last post of over two months ago are against the rules.