I’ve been thinking about picking up a decent copy of the delta species fire type Mew, but I can’t decide on which version to buy. My understanding is that there are 4 different versions: Japanese Summer Battle Road, POP series 3 non-holo, POP 3 holo (upside down back), and POP 3 holo (corrected back).
At first I wanted to pick whichever is rarest but I think I would really enjoy having a holo version over the others. A couple things I have questions about are:
How frequent does the holo bleed occur on the holofoil versions? Ultimately I would like a holo bleed, but I don’t know if I need to actively seek it out or if it’s pretty much on every card.
Which is rarer? The corrected back or upside-down back in holofoil? I ask this because I think the pop report is a little messy as I have seen upside-down cards labeled under the regular holofoil version.
I own several graded upside down error copies. It’s hard to know which English holographic card is rarer due to misgrading by PSA and selective submission. My assumption would be that the upside down error is more common, but also more interesting in my opinion.
Something to note is that many of the holographic copies were damaged upon arrival (or at best PSA 6) due to its limited protection from the DP Value Pack 1.
It’s anecdotal, but I have quite a few of this holo Mew because my younger brother was heavily into collecting cards in 2008-2009ish. Of the 10+ that I have, all of them have the upside-down back. So it seems almost certain to me that the upside-down back version is more common (otherwise I’d expect to have at least one of the corrected version).
@Dyl I really enjoyed seeing the packaging the Mew came in. I sometimes forget that POP cards don’t just come in the small boosters
Overall I have noticed the quality is pretty rough on this particular card. I don’t think I’ll be picking up a minty card but maybe roughly a PSA 8 quality is what I’ll look for.
All of the holo POP cards come from blisters/tins, btw. None of mine are better than PSA 7 quality, despite the cards overall being cared for pretty well. I think the card quality in that 2008-2009 era was particularly rough – much worse than it was just 5 years prior.
Just to tag onto this; there are actually no holo cards included within POP Boosters! Every holofoil POP Series card will have been found in some kind of bundle/tin/blister like the one linked above!
@Tapp and @zorloth are correct that Pop Series holo cards came from blisters/tins. This is also why they are increasingly rare, and why very few if any will be “entering” the market (i.e., most blisters/tins are hard to find nowadays).
It’s anecdotal, but I’ve actually found the holo POP cards to be much more common than the non-holos (particularly for the ones that were originally rares like the Lugia/Mew). The blisters/tins that contained them were mass-market products and were basically the de-facto way of casual collectors getting product back then. POP packs were only distributed at tournaments, with the exception of POP 1/2 packs that were also included in a select few mass-market products.
That said, the non-holo cards are likely to be in better shape than the holo variants because they came from pop series packs and not from tins/blisters.
Yea, the holo rare’s are a lot more common than the non-holo rares for the POP series. For some reason the rare’s in POP series packs are pretty tough pulls.
Another thing to note with the pop report for these cards is that PSA screws up a lot and will label the holo as a non-holo. I have seen it countless times where the card is clearly holo, but the label doesn’t denote it.
I’d also like to note that the graded holo copies are often quite poor for their respective PSA grades. It seems to me that PSA is a bit more lenient on these cards given how awful their “pack fresh” condition can be.
Even the non-holos can be pretty rough. Of the rares I pulled, the Flygon, 1 of the Chimechos, and 1 of the Deoxys exs were damaged (presumably due to how the original owner stored the packs).
I graded the other rares with CGC, with the following results: 2 Chimechos got 9.5s, 1 Chimecho got 9, Deoxys #2 got 9, and both Deoxys exs got 9s. Almost every card I pulled had (at a minimum) prominent white corner nicks. Those 2 Chimechos I graded are the only two gem-mint graded copies across all of the major grading companies, which is a testament to how difficult these cards are to find in mint condition (or at all, frankly).
They certainly were undervalued at a point. A couple years ago, I was buying all of the Chimechos/Sceptiles I could find for <$30 a piece (which, admittedly, wasn’t many – <10 total lol). They’re worth quite a bit now, though. I sold my spare 9.5 Chimecho for $600 and the 9 for $450. IMO, those prices are strong and make sense!
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