Oops, I did it again
I played with the cards, got lost in Japan
Well, I am back on another trip to Japan.
Since this will be the last trip in the foreseeable future I wanted to make the best out of it and enjoy it with you guys.
I found around 200 new shops to visit and wanted to share my experience with you.
As always.
Did you find any bargains I’ve missed?
What are the most interesting cards to you?
The situation seems to be a very different from last year I’d it comes to modern sealed. Where I could barely find any boxes last year almost every store has them for sale. Even with shrink wrap. I thought TCPI prohibited that?
And the prices are across the bank really good except for 151.
So far the journey is going great and I had an amazing talk with a shop owner. After a while he revealed his private collection to me and showed me these
Welcome back, if you’re in Tokyo let me know if you’d like to go out to shops together.
What are those legendary birds from the owner’s private collection? They look like the GB sprite illustrations, but then why do they have fossil stamps. Are they real?
Edit:
Took a look at bulbapedia, seems like this illustration was used for the tropical mega battle and media factory lotto phone cards, but there’s isn’t information about any cards being printed with this illustration
I’ll try to sometimes go a bit more structured over the shops to not just pictures dump you and make it more reader friendly for you.
So the first shop had a bunch of interesting cards. But as expected from this store all in bad condition and quite pricy for their condition. But definitely fun to browse.
The next shop was a treasure trove. I spend 2-3 hours in that shop with the owner handing me new stacks of cards everytime I finished a stack. I went through so many cards and bought a ton. Almost no cards were mint but prices were a steal. The owner even encouraged me to negotiate with him.
The owner was a young guy who opened the shop 6 months ago. This shop really proves that the best shops are the ones not in the heart of the touristy areas.
I went to a couple of shops after that but they had barely anything not worthy. One shop had stickers that showed were also up on Mercari. That was interesting.
Wow, really great thread and hope you are having a great time. I am guessing this trip is more relaxed, also owning to the fact that you have a lot of experience from your trip last year. Lovely pictures as always. It is so awesome to see these cards on display in shops. I see some promos which really caught my eyes, but other than that there seems to be cards readily available at least.
Stay safe buddy and enjoy your time there. Looking forward to all your updates.
I speak a little bit of Japanese. For the beginning we used a translator app to understand what we wanted from each other. After that we were just throwing numbers around until someone agreed
But I didn’t dare to negotiate too hard so only went for 10%-20%.
I was surprised by another shop owner I talked to who said its in general okay to ask friendly if negotiating is okay. So I’ll try that a bit more. In big stores like book off they probably won’t do it but doesn’t hurt to give it a try.
But I think overall even if you use an app it shouldn’t be too difficult since you can just write down numbers.
The last shop I went to had a nice collection of Retro Pokémon games with good prices. Is it weird that I only bought half of the games I could have bought because I don’t want the Hunt to be over yet?
