I was looking at Japanese Southern Islands sets on EBay and noticed that the majority of the available sets are either (i) lose card sets or (ii) six sealed sets of three cards.
The binders for the Japanese sets including the cards are available but they are far more scarce. Does anyone know why these binders are far more scarce?
Well they’re 20+ years old so it’s normal that a kid somewhere along the way would have opened it. Any sealed toy is going to be at least somewhat rare.
Didn’t someone sell a buttload of them in bulk not too long ago and flood the market? Or was that the English version?
@cross I completely agree that the sealed version of any old set should be more rare. However, in this particular instance it seems that the binder itself is just more rare (sealed and unsealed). Maybe the binder was distributed differently but I couldn’t really figure it out.
@engadgeter, So if im not mistaken here, the binder versions of the Japanese sets were distributed through a special movie release (could be wrong here, but I know it was one of those exclusive promo give outs that happens for certain events) and the sets with 3 cards a piece were reprints due to demand, hence the price differences you might have seen. Ive been in the market for the japanese ones myself and thats what ive gathered so far from researching, but the one element ive found hard to locate is if the cards in the binder are different from that of the ones reprinted. As far as I can see from comparing, I saw no known distinguishable difference, but again im not certain. As for the english side of the sets, they were only released via the binder set which included all the cards, a binder, and i believe a few packs too (could be wrong there as well, but i think thats the full contents. Hopefully this helps a little!