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.
Same as zubat . I had zero knowledge about sets (actually I didn’t even know that cards came in “sets”). Everything we knew came from word of mouth, usually from kids who had older brothers, but honestly nobody cared too much lol.
I had a vague understanding that cards periodically rotated, though for me a booster pack or another was the same, I just prayed for something I liked. Funny thing, I was aware of bulbapedia, serebii and similar websites, but I only used them for the games.
One of the many other thousands of children and their parents mourning wallet. I still remember when the “trading” part of the TCG was very relevant, and helped a ton. The other promos were fun to find out about as well when you could nerd out, and the shop owner would excitedly annouce the next league event to everyone. Marketing from magazines, and later TV ads were handy as well. Times have changed
I’m too young to have been around for when cards first released, but beginning of Gen 3 era I had friends show me their cards and I got obsessed. That’s how I was introduced to it. A bit after, Gen 4 comes around and I loved Darkrai a lot so I kept buying packs to pull a Darkrai card not understanding how sets worked and that you can only pull certain cards in certain sets. I only ever had the Black Star Promo Enigma Berry Darkrai and never pulled a single Darkrai.
The local comic book store was pretty much where I found out about anything new with Pokemon when the cards released. My dad would take me once or twice a month. It was also my introduction to Japanese cards. No other store (at least that I knew of) carried non-English product in the area. I still remember the day he showed me the Japanese prints of Southern Islands.
I had some set list pamphlets so I understood you could only get certain cards from certain sets. Because of this, I never wanted to open a bunch of the same set. I didn’t want a bunch of duplicates if I could avoid it. I never knew what the cards looked like before I pulled them though. It was all a mystery until a pulled them!
I knew that different sets existed but I had no idea about what was in them, value, set lists, game mechanics etc. I remember my favourite set was Base set because my favourite Pokémon was Blastoise, I’m guessing I just successfully put 2 and 2 together that if he’s on the pack art he must be in the pack.
To be honest, the complete mystery for most people is one of the best things about the early days of Pokemon cards that we will never, ever be able to get back.
Wasn’t around for the first releases, but around qnd collected late gen 3/early gen 4 sets.
I watched primetimepokemon and a couple other youtubers. I think another was Arcanine88, and random youtube videos. other than that, just from school or cousins.
One video I remember in particular was almost like a slideshow video showing the rarest pokemon cards in the world with price estimations (prob around 2008 or 09) and it’s crazy remembering that some of the trophies were only estimated at 5k - 10k+.
Went to school and just saw cards from other kids. Traded based on what I liked, outside of Charizard. EVERYONE knew Charizard meant you were better than everyone else
Thinking back, I didn’t know there were different sets until Neo Genesis came out. Likely because the cards had a different font, but I remember that being a HUGE deal to me. Seeing someone with a Togetic was insane. LUGIA was unseen outside of the movie
I opened packs and saw cards. I went to WOTC store, and got promos. Through interaction. I never sought information out. Organically discovering things was the way of a child. The world is more fun that way.
I used to go to a few card shops at the mall, and played in the league for a bit. One of the shops had vending sheets and other stuff. My favorite was the Japanese food market. They would have Japanese packs and I always thought they were so cool. Also magazines had all the info.
I understood that different sets existed. I collected/played MTG and would regularly buy different looking packs or decks that had unique set symbols. But it was impossible to find information about new releases or cards not obtained through movies/packs/decks. Definitely had no clue about Japanese cards. I only had access to packs and decks from big box stores like Walmart or Toys 'R Us. I didn’t visit my first card store until ~2009 or 2010.
Probably listened to some stupid kid on the playground who just made stuff up or probably hit up Ask Jeeves. I still have the checklist I used for Base, Jungle and Fossil when I was a kid but not sure if I knew about the other sets cause they were all in Japanese for me at the time from my Uncle and family sending me some packs over.
. I had zero knowledge about sets (actually I didn’t even know that cards came in “sets”). Everything we knew came from word of mouth, usually from kids who had older brothers, but honestly nobody cared too much lol.
