Prerelease Misty's Seadra - Undervalued or overgraded?

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Before I start, I’ll preface this thread by saying that earlier today I bought 4 PSA 10 Prerelease Misty’s Seadra cards as a small-time investment. I had contemplated submitting this thread without making that known, but I figured that would be a bit unfair. This thread isn’t intended as a ‘let me secretly hype up this card I just bought’, but rather for me to find out whether or not I’ve made a good decision. My plan is not to attempt to resell them immediately for a quick profit, but instead to sit on them (figuratively…) for a few years.

In my End of Year 2019 PSA Report thread I revealed that it could be argued that Prerelease Misty’s Seadra is the third hardest Pokémon card to grade with a sample size of over 500, and is the ninth hardest if we look at cards with a sample size over 200.

In the past 12 months, Prerelease Misty’s Seadra in PSA 10 has sold for as little as $17 at auction, with an anomalous 12 month high of $179.99 just 3 days ago, this is a long way from the all time high sale of $342 back in November 2017.

Comparing the PSA 8.5, 9, 9Q and 10 grades to calculate a difficulty value, back when I made my PSA Report thread I gave this card a difficulty score of 91.6006% - an 8.3994% chance of a ‘minty’ card being awarded a PSA 10. Now at the end of February that has gone down ever so slightly to 90.7994%.

To put that into some perspective, a PSA 10 1st Edition Dark Magneton sold yesterday for just under $3,100, and in January a different copy sold for $5,000. Back when I made my previous thread, I gave that card a score of 90.4661%. Fast forward to today and this has slightly gone up to 90.593%.

At the time of writing this post there are 61 PSA 10 Prerelease Misty’s Seadra and 46 PSA 10 1st Edition Dark Magneton cards graded, with Seadra having a sample size of 663 and Magneton a sample size of 489. Team Rocket is definitely a more desirable set compared against Gym Heroes in that it’s had double the amount of sales which have attracted triple the value (according to PSA’s APR page at any rate), so that’s definitely a factor. No Dark Magneton cards sold publicly in 2019 either - at least not to PSA’s knowledge - which indicates a low supply, but if we zoom out a little we’ll see that there have been 20 (including the 4 I picked up today) PSA 10 Misty’s Seadra sales against 10 PSA 10 Magneton sales since May 2017 - not a massive difference.

In my mind there are ultimately 4 factors at play here:

  1. Misty’s Seadra is more readily available, leading to a much lower price;
  2. Dark Magneton is perceived to be harder to grade;
  3. Magneton is more popular than Seadra;
  4. A prerelease card may not be as desirable as a main set card.

But is that the end of the story? Is Misty’s Seadra a card which has signs of growth potential, or is it just a case of being a lot easier to grade than PSA’s population report would lead me to believe?

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Short answer: You’re comparing a promo to set card. It’s just not a good comparison for many reasons.

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  1. Not that many people collect Gym heroes as religiously as team rocket. It’s one of the least popular wotc sets(still popular enough, but I’m talking compared to the other wotc sets)
  2. Even if there’s Gym heroes set builders, they probably don’t include this prerelease card as being a part of the set. It’s an unfair comparison, but for a lot of jungle set builders, they don’t count prefable either
  3. Seadra is not popular, and Kingdra takes the top spot in that evo line. For the Magnezone line, magneton takes the cake though because of all the historic wotc artwork with it as Magnezone came a bit late(Gen 4)
  4. Although statistically Misty’s Seadra is a hard card to grade, it doesn’t have that perception, mostly because it isn’t a card that is talked about at all

I do think that it is not a bad investment though, and if I could have gotten it for $17 I would have immediately jumped on it lol. Sadly I think to increase a decent amount this card would require some instagram/facebook hype about the difficulty to grade, but even then I’m sure that most owners would still readily release their copies to the wild for any $150-200 offer

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Ha, I guess I won’t be in a position to do much about that. Hey, I collect Pichu cards, take a look at this Seadra…
:grin:

I’m not sure that’s strictly true for Prerelease-stamped cards. Clefable is obviously an outlier because it has no PSA 10s and only a handful of PSA 9s graded, but if we ignore that and look at Fossil’s Aerodactyl the value is in line with the regular Aerodactyl print. Even Gyarados from Gym Challenge which has significantly more PSA 10s graded sells for higher than the Seadra, but I guess popularity takes over in that case.

Very good points. I had stopped opening packs as a kid just after the Team Rocket set came out, so all of these sets are relatively new to me - I always forget about Kingdra, too!

I feel like it makes sense for Jungle collectors to ignore the Prerelease Clefable. I can imagine if one of those pops up it’d easily sell for 5 figures. I wonder if historically Clefable was easier to grade and the whole Raichu drama hadn’t happened, would Prerelease cards in general attract a premium?

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Prerelease Seadra is risky in a sense that all it takes is someone to grade 100 of them and half get 10s to greatly affect the market. Finding 100 loose mint Seadra is ifintiely easier than 100 loose Dark Magneton as an example. But yeah if you are buying them at like $17 it’s a no brainer

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@pichufan, It’s awesome initially discovering those sets. They went wild on some of the holos like Rocket’s moltres which I really love

Also prefable is so stupidly hard to grade, I wouldn’t be surprised either

I agree that the Raichu drama definitely turned a lot of people away from prerelease cards (excluding evolutions zard, that card is still at a pretty good price.) I still think prereleases are pretty cool though :blush:

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Agreed with what was sort of said before. You need to take into account how difficult it is to acquire raw mint examples to change the pop drastically. I’m not sure how many mint seadras are around and how much they cost but it is unlikely to be as expensive or as challenging to acquire mint, pack-fresh cards from Gym Heroes or Neo sets where boxes and packs are going through the roof.

This is in addition to the other factors mentioned above (popularity, etc.). I love the artwork in Gym Heroes and want to start my own holo set soon.