The Question of the Day is a way to facilitate community discussion to help members ponder the unanswered questions of the world that are somehow relating to the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
Definitely product releases. It seems I cant go even a few months without finding something new about product that is over 25yrs old. It still happens now though, bundled products that are officially released but are never reported on. They pop up one day and then disappear without ever being mentioned. And thats based on english, cant even imagine how difficult non-english products are to follow.
Have to agree with this. Especially for foreign releases, information is tough to find. Even more so if the card themselves are already tough to find, which is mostly the case for the WotC era foreign promos.
When I was writing my ‘Pikachu around the World’ collection updates, even just release dates of certain sets, especially in Portuguese, were near impossible to find. For some, most I’ve only made a vague estimate, which might be off by a year for all I know…
Having said that, even though it’s a huge rabbit hole, I do enjoy it when I do find the information and learn something new about it. Even though I wrote my collection posts and articles because I already knew a lot about them and wanted to both document and share it with others, I also learned a lot of new details while writing them and finding bits of information.
And even today, there are still new releases to be discovered from years ago. Take the Mini Deck cards from 2018 that I’ve only learned about a few months ago.
This forum! I don’t participate too much since joining, but every day I’m reading, learning and enjoying.
I’ve mentioned the how to start collecting post from this site a few times and how helpful it was and still is for me as a very new collector, but one of the things was to read and learn rather than getting carried away with buying, ripping random packs and get carried away with FOMO etc.
Reading various posts has really curbed that desire, in that I’m getting as much enjoyment from learning as I have been from the actual collecting which has sometimes involved reading back months and months and not realising where the time has gone!
Yeah exactly like you said the sheer depth and rabbit holes are amazing in this tcg, I think that’s one of the things that makes it such a successful and endearing franchise. I’ve really enjoyed going through the history of No Rarity (shock, I know), though it’s not the deepest of rabbit holes compared to others. Despite it already being a well documented error / line of cards, PSA is still making plenty of errors in their grading.
The articles that scholars like @Quuador write are still incredibly undervalued resources. E4 is (obviously) already the pinnacle of collecting sanctuaries, but the rate at which information is being disseminated and shared seems to be increasing year on year. The attention to detail and analytical skills that people display on this forum are just brilliant. For those like me who don’t spend as much time in the Hahbee as more serious collectors, having these sources of information at my finger tips as and when the inclination to learn strikes me, for free, is incredible. If it wasn’t for these articles, half the trainers in my binder would have mistakenly been from the Quick Starter Gift Set rather than true Expansion Pack no rarity error cards.
Aside from E4, I found https://www.serebii.net/ to be a huge help to get up to date on new and old Pokemon related things. YouTube of course has a ton of info, especially from the longer term collectors. Sometimes you have to dig, but there’s lots of gold there. Unfortunately a lot of the better content I feel has been buried the past couple years by pack openings and people promoting or speculating on the newest releases, but there’s still a lot there if you look hard enough.
Also, PSA articles are really good in my experience. It basically will tell you all the fine details about many specific sets and cards that can sometimes be hard to find, and they generally interview really knowledgeable people (smpratte, etc). Just do a search under non-sports category and search for Pokemon and you will find a lot of really valuable info quickly:
Trying to find information for the Rayquaza BW 2012 Game Show promo (and still trying to find that accursed 3rd #)
I’ve learned a lot about other rare cards pretaining to rayquaza, along with it’s illustration contest cameos. Once I find that 3rd #, That’ll probably be it and I’ll be able to just track price data for it.
All of it. Information in the hahbee wasn’t really respected until it could be weaponized, monetized and/or used to feed intellectual vanity. Combine that with the corporate secrecy, sloppiness and abject indifference on the side of TPC/TPCI, and every new piece of information feels like drawing blood from a stone.
An area in particular I really enjoy is the documentation of early tournament’s, events and the general Pokémon experience in Japan from roughly 1996-2002. It was such a wholesome time and reading about what it was like to be a kid in Japan who loved Pokémon is simultaneously extremely relatable, yet still very foreign.
Foreign wotc black star promos. Finding information about their releases and distribution has been a nightmare. There’s cards I was for sure didn’t exist until I stumble across one on card market. Then dead end again bc I can’t purchase it living in America lol. I’m still determined to complete a binder of every wotc black star in every language ever to exist
I thought I had found every or most every Arita prmotional and retail product… then I found another. And another… and I’m still finding them today! (And I mean the ones from the 2005-2015 era. The golden era of binder and postcard, and clearfile art.
Can i answer non-tcg as a whole? You think you know something until someone discovers that the set you have had completed for ages has these weird variants that no one can explain, and then while trying to figure that out a completely new unseen product just pops up out of nowhere
I don’t participate too much since joining, but every day I’m reading, learning and enjoying.
write are still incredibly undervalued resources. E4 is (obviously) already the pinnacle of collecting sanctuaries, but the rate at which information is being disseminated and shared seems to be increasing year on year. The attention to detail and analytical skills that people display on this forum are just brilliant. For those like me who don’t spend as much time in the Hahbee 
as more serious collectors, having these sources of information at my finger tips as and when the inclination to learn strikes me, for free, is incredible. If it wasn’t for these articles, half the trainers in my binder would have mistakenly been from the Quick Starter Gift Set rather than true Expansion Pack no rarity error cards.
