Thanks!
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No problem.
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Since Ascended Heroes has now released, it’s time for the first major update. The past week has seen the arrival of the first wave of my purchases, let me start with a picture of all new additions at once first
Now going shipment by shipment, the first order contained the three versions of the regular Larry’s Staraptor from Ascended Heroes in German
I also received another shipment containing the same cards in English
And a third one with the French counterparts
Then, I also got those cards in Italian, but since the Italian Illustration Rare is super cheap, I already threw that in with the order as well
And finally, saving the best for last, we have the letter that definitely traveled the longest, bringing me both Larry’s Staraptor cards from the MEGA Start Deck 100 Battle Collection in Traditional Chinese
After the proxy shipping service I previously used stopped offering their Taiwan service, I had to find a new one. Buy Taiwan Online isn’t exactly cheap, but at least got me the cards reliably.
With all the new releases, my collection progress initially dropped to just over 80%, but with these purchases, I’m almost at 90% completion again
That’s it for the first major update, looking forward to hopefully covering the more difficult to source languages soon!
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Really great update. I cannot fathom the card variations in every language for every card. Nice work hunting them down and thanks for sharing.
Cheers!
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Wow, amazing collection! I think those Larry’s Staraptor cards from Ascended Heroes are some of the best Staraptor cards yet.
Staraptor is probably in my top 5 favorite Pokemon, so it’s great to see it fully collected like this. Especially the Polish and Russian cards, which I am still on the hunt for for my Ninetales collection.
Have you ever thought about expanding your Staraptor collection to include non-TCG (Peru, Topsun, poker cards, etc.)? Since it’s gen 4 you miss out on a lot of the non-TCG madness like the Topps TV cards, and with a brief search it doesn’t seem like there are too many non-TCG Staraptor cards out there, so it probably wouldn’t be very difficult.
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Thanks! I have thought about non TCG cards, however due to the lack of documentation I decided against it for now. Maybe one day if we don’t get a new Staraptor card in a long time and I get bored 
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Since I managed to also find a seller having all of them in Spanish, I have now completed the bulk cards in all the languages easily accessible in Europe. Next goal are the missing Illustration Rares in those languages and then hopefully also the more difficult languages soon.
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My next round of Cardmarket purchases brings the Japanese, German, English, French and European Spanish Illustration Rares of Larry’s Staraptor, thus completing everything available in Europe and putting the total progress at now exactly 93%.
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Time for another major update with a new round of purchases! Let me again first start with the group photo:
Now, going through the orders, we first have all the Portuguese copies of Larry’s Staraptor coming in from Brazil:
Next up were the Korean cards from the Start Deck 100 Battle Collection:
There, it took me a while to be fast enough when the Illustration Rare showed up for sale, because they tended to get sold pretty quickly on Bunjang in the time after release (but what would an Asian deck release in non-Japanese languages be for a species collector, if it didn’t come with at least some difficulties?)
The same cards later also arrived from Thailand, where they were part of a regular set though:
And finally, also the Indonesian equivalents that I received with the kind help of @tinyroadadhi yesterday:
This puts my total progess at exactly 98% with now only the four Latin American Spanish cards missing, which will be a challenge. Let’s see how long it takes until I can hopefully post an update that makes the title correct again. I also took the time to update the main post today, to add all the new cards and binder pages in etc. so that I’ll only have to swap pictures once the final cards arrive.
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Huge congrats on the milestones! I’m amazed at the level of detail you put into this and have absolutely been taking notes, especially your polish resources because the struggle is real. I can’t wait to see the collection grow as time goes on- give this bird a full art!!!
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Thank you!
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