I don’t feel happy that I don’t collect certain pokemon. Ultimately, I will focus on what I want to collect, rather than getting all releases of a pokemon. I will not own a Snap Koffing, but that doesn’t make me think less of collecting Koffing, quite the contrary. It is one of the few pokemon I do collect. The same goes with other tough ones like Pikachu and Charizard. I get the excitement in collecting any and everything under the sun that features a particular pokemon, but there are also very real limits to this. I am not losing sleep over not having a card with 20 copies, 100, or that costs five figures+, or one thats even over $100.
I debated with writing “or just be like @Quuador and do both things”, but i opted to reword my point to be a little less dramatic with the numbers of pikachus released
Yeah,. the big ones must be a major slog. Tho, there are a LOT of cards to choose from, if you’re noit a completionist.
I’m glad I collect Porygon, because it’s a “prize PkMn”. But I always wonder, if I collected the actual prize mythicals, like Mew, Jirachi, etc, it would similarly be an expensive, arduous process.
As a Jirachi fan and collector, it’s actually way more affordable than you would think without looking deeply into its cards.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly not an easy species, it’s the right amount of rarity/uniqueness etc. imo
Obviously you can make it harder e.g. For cameos it gets tricky due to Pal City or Players Ceremony 2019 and also there is a prize card Jirachi in Thai(?)
Looking solely at English though, it’s even easier than it was going when I was dabbling in Lucario, Snorlax and some of my
other favourites, and especially easier than Celebi and Mew that are two of my other favourites that I could never justify due to how much of a premium they seem to fetch over Jirachi.
Add Pichu to that as well for the exact same reason.
My fiancée loves Pichu, and I was looking to casually get an art set of every Pichu art in a binder for her a few years ago (mostly for me where she would be more excited to see lol) and quickly realized that is not possible for some of those illustration contest cards haha
I want to explain this answer. It’s true that a lot of pokemon have one or two expensive cards or cameos. But you can choose to not collect those. Plus a challenge/goal doesn’t hurt. With Pokemon like Gengar or Umbreon (or Charizard of course), every card feels relatively expensive. So even in a basic Gengar collection, each card is going to be painful.
At some point I’m going to need the FRLG Gengar ex in PSA 9 and I’m dreading the price tag. Relative to other ex cards it’s not particularly impressive or interesting, it’s just a popular pokemon. It costs 10x the price of Electrode ex for example. <$100 versus >$1000
100% true. Same with Umbreon, as you said, and I would include Mew in there too. My wallet winces every time I think about the expensive set cards for my species.
I’m thankful to have gotten my Gengar EX before it nearly doubled in price. And I agree with you, it’s one of the weaker EX arts.
Poor Mantyke
Mantyke does appear in one of the movies and so the merch portion of mantyke collecting could be fun !
I would say collecting unpopular pokemon may enable you to collect other unpopular pokemon (or just other stuff) collection wise.
(Fun fact I also collect the porygon line, Ludicolo line and Aipom line, but much less seriously, the Porygon line gets hard at some point for the Fan club card (luckily only in Japanese aha) and pokemon center online porygon and Porygon-2 merch appearences)
Any popular pokemon that gets a lot of named cards and cameos would fall into this area for me. I focus on collecting pikachu myself and I’ve already resigned myself to never truly master collecting it due to expensive cards such as the trophies and snap.
Particular pokemon that seem easy at first may not be as simple as people think, especially if cameos are taken into account. This art academy gourgeist card for example would be very difficult to obtain for many ghost species collectors:
