So, I bought this card for a pretty penny. It’s obviously not the 1st edition copy.
Is it normal for the unlimited versions of the same card to have a smaller pop report than their 1st edition version?
Example:
The card in question is this Gengar I purchased:
160 copies submitted; 47 PSA 10’s and 81 PSA 9’s
The 1st edition version has 201 total submissions with 81 PSA 10’s and 88 PSA 9’s
I get the fact you’ll have more 10’s and 9’s when the submissions are higher, but not like this though.
To be honest, I never paid attention to pop reports until the other day (thanks youtube!!). I always thought that the 1st Editions weren’t printed as much as the unlimited version. It maybe, but it leaves me asking; “is this normal, to see unlimited cards with lower numbers than their 1st edition counterpart?
As Krill said, 1st Ed. is more expensive, which makes people more likely to grade it.
Neo unlimited print runs were smaller relative to their respective 1st Ed. print runs. I think it’s pretty widely accepted that 1st Ed. made up much more than 10% of the print run of the Neo sets. Look at Troll & Toad’s buylist – they often offer more for Unlimited Neo cards than the identical 1st Ed. Neo cards.
Exactly what @zorloth, said! I’ve graded a few thousand cards over the years, but never sent in any unlimited cards (besides the big three in Base set). I assume unlimited has been an after thought to most set collectors.
It’s crazy to think about but before 2020 there was very little incentive to grade unlimited versions of anything really unless they were 10 contenders. 8s used to sell at grading cost.
The popularity of Pokemon went on a steady decline from Rocket moving forward. The simple answer, while we’ll never have data on quantity printed for any WOTC Pokemon set, is that the popularity steadily declined as time went on. This is why Neo unlimited was smaller than base and its surrounding sets, and this is why E-reader series era was even smaller. It is just what happened. Obviously, Pokemon had a resurgence in the mainstream starting sometime in the earlier to mid-2010s, but that was long since WOTC cards went out of print, and were cemented in their availability. I’d guess Base outnumbers Neo Gen 10 to 1. But just a guess.
This is normal for almost every card outside of Base Set. Up until very recently it hasn’t been worth the time or money to get unlimited cards graded as for most cards unless they came back with a PSA 10 grade they’d struggle to cover the grading cost - and even in PSA 10 most unlimited cards used to be under $50.
That itself has only changed very recently. With the chart @pkmnflyingmaster shared before you can see how much of a dramatic change this has been - people have suddenly became very interested in these cards. This will very likely lead to an influx of these being graded over the next 6-12 months as all of a sudden they are now worth grading.
On a different note, the presence of a 1st Edition stamp tends to add value even when the 1st Edition set isn’t rarer. In Japan quite a few sets have a 50/50 split between 1st Edition and unlimited and some have significantly fewer unlimited cards printed, yet the 1st Edition variants will almost always command a premium. People tend not to care about an unlimited version of a card when it has a 1st Edition variant, even if the unlimited version may be significantly harder to find.
An example of this in action is the Chinese Base Set which had a smaller unlimited print run. In PWCC’s September auction block they sold PSA 10 copies of the 1st Edition and unlimited Charmander, and despite even having a slightly lower PSA 10 pop, the unlimited Charmander sold for under half what the 1st Edition copy sold for:
