In the MTG world, it’s known that the print run of Revised had at least 15x the print run of Unlimited, that Unlimited had ~5x the print of Beta, and that Beta had 2.8x the print run of Alpha. Of course, there were never print run numbers released for Pokemon TCG sets as there were for the early Magic sets. But there has to be a good sense among the most experienced Pokemon TCG collectors of the relative scarcity of sets. There has been a significant amount of discussion of this in the MTG community, even for post-1994 sets where there weren’t print run numbers released. For instance, any serious MTG collector knows that there is zero chance that the print run of, say, Mirage wasn’t >10x larger than the print run of Starter 1999. There are rules-of-thumb when it comes to relative scarcity, but I simply haven’t been able to find anything similar for the Pokemon TCG.
We all know that Base Set Unlimited had a dramatically larger print run than Skyridge. But roughly how much larger? From what I’ve been able to tell, there’s no chance Skyridge had more than 1/10th the print run of Base Set Unlimited, but I honestly don’t know whether or not it had 1/10th of the print run or 1/1000th the print run. Likewise, it’s obvious that EX-Series sets (with the likely exception of Power Keepers) had smaller print runs than most WotC sets. But how much smaller? From what I can tell, even WotC 1st Edition print runs were larger than most EX-era print runs. But I would honestly be curious whether, say, EX TMTA had 1/5th the print run of Unlimited Neo Genesis, or 1/10th, or 1/100th. Does anyone have their fingers on the pulse of the relative scarcity of sets? Some of you who have been collecting/involved in the market for a while (i.e., smpratte, Gary) have to have some sense of relative scarcity. Since it can (and has been) roughly approximated for post-1994 MTG sets, I see no reason why there isn’t some sort of rule-of-thumb approach for Pokemon TCG sets among collectors. Or are there rules-of-thumb? I’ve been trying to find this sort of information but have had zero luck. Any thoughts on this?
I would love to hear from the most experienced here as to their views.
If someone wanted to take the time to do the math, it could be extrapolated by combing through PSA pop reports. For example, pick a card from each set that everybody will grade and look at the pop. I picked a few easy ones below but some version of this could be done for all sets.
1st edition base charizard 2369 TOTAL submitted to psa for grading
skyridge crystal charizard regular holo 440 TOTAL submitted
Gold star rayquaza 346 TOTAL submitted
Yes I know people will crack these and resubmit so the pop isn’t accurate, but for these three cards as a simplifying assumption you could assume it’s done equally. Let’s say these cards represent the theoretical total pop for the equivalent card from each set. This would suggest 1st ed base holo is 5.4x as common as a skyridge crystal, and 6.5x as common as a gold star EX series. That’s a meaningless comparison though, as the pull rates for those cards are different, so you have to adjust the math.
1st ed base holos are 9 per box, or 9/36
Crystal skyridge 2 per box, or 2/36
Gold stars are 1 per 2 boxes, or 1/72
to get to “apples to apples”, the gold star pop needs to be 6552 (multiply by 18)
the skyridge crystal pop needs to be 1980 (multiply by 4.5)
Compared to base set holo pop of 2369
These aren’t the actual pops but can be used for relative comparison.
Extrapolating that out, ex deoxys is more than 3x the print run of skyridge, and 2.5x first ed base set. Skyridge print run is slightly lower than 1st ed base set.
This could be done systematically for all pokemon sets. It relies on a fair number of assumptions, but for old WOTC sets and gold star EX- sets its’s probably a decent approximation. The newer the set, the less accurate this will be because the graded pop is not reflective of the theoretical actual. Also, if a set lacks a “big card” that everyone will submit, and also re-submit, it’s probably less accurate.
I may do this math for all of the gold star and WOTC sets sometime if I have the time, but will throw the gauntlet out to anyone else who wants to do it.
I would take PSA population reports with a grain of salt when it comes to trying to figure out total distribution for the cards.
Consider that for many years people hardly graded anything other than 1st edition Base Set because people didn’t see other set cards as being valuable enough to bother grading.
It’s an easy assumption to make that a much higher % of 1st edition Base Set cards that have ever been opened have been submitted to PSA compared to other sets.
But at the same time, I would say it’s also fair to assume that distribution for English declined significantly after Team Rocket because that was post-hype for the original era.
I’m not opposed to using PSA population reports to try to make educated guesses about distribution, but there’s not a 1-to-1 correlation between PSA population report and distribution.
Agree but that’s why I specifically picked the rayquaza gold star and the crystal zard as examples. Presumably most anyone with a mint-looking copy is getting those graded, and they are also cracking and re-submitting for higher grades just like base set zard. But could be wrong…
There are many flaws in this, but it’s one way that it could be extrapolated to have a “relative” comparison between sets. Margin of error is fairly large
The pop report is a resource, not the full answer.
I agree e series is more scarce, but we will never know finite numbers as no set was consistently submitted to Psa like base set. Base will mostly likely always have a larger pop because people submitted since day one. Where most weren’t consistently submitting e series, or most sets for that matter
With Base Set Charizard it’s a combination of everything. More than just cracking and re-submitting, I think the main factor is that people have always seen every Base Charizard (especially 1st edition) as a sort of prize that is worthy of grading. Even to the present day, people see a 1st edition Base Set Charizard and they think that’s something that needs to be professionally graded, no matter the condition. I think with other sets people don’t generally think a card is worth grading unless they know it’s mint (although perhaps that will continue to change more in the future with the rise in the value of the lower-graded cards).
If I did the math from above in a spreadsheet and got really scientific, I could create an adjustment factor for first ed charizard based on the grade distributions. Because I think you’re right that people even grade low grade 1st ed base charizards that look like they pulled them from the garbage. Probably not so much for any other card. Also given grading prevalence of 1st ed base overall, maybe other sets are easier to compare against one another, need to think about it. Of course these are all just going to be subject to big assumptions. But they still could be useful for “directional”, “relative” comparisons.
Not committing to do this BTW, seems like a lot of brain damage
Yeah, I think it’s not the best approach. Sets that have been out longer will (almost assuredly) have had a higher proportion of graded cards relative to the actual amount of cards printed. But there are even more confounding variables. Cards in better condition have a higher likelihood of being submitted to PSA for grading, which might imply that the referring to the pop report would actually overestimate the print run of modern sets. But at the same time people are less likely to submit newer cards to be graded in the first place.
Another variable is what proportion of sealed product relative to the amount originally printed remains sealed. It’s very tough to find sealed EX-Series boxes, but it’s unclear if the scarcity of those is because people were less likely to keep them sealed or if less was printed in the first place. Most likely it’s a mixture of both. But going off of the availability of booster boxes alone, one could only infer that sets such as EX Dragon had much lower print runs than Skyridge. There are probably well over 100 sealed Skyridge booster boxes left. I’m not sure if there are even 50 sealed EX Dragon booster boxes left. Though I could be totally wrong; maybe smpratte or some Alpha Investments-esque figure has 200 boxes in their possession. But judging on the availability of boxes alone, the print run of Skyridge seems to have been significantly higher. But it’s not clear that this is actually the case according to various accounts I’ve read online.
I think the print run of EX-era sets might actually be overestimated by the pop reports, as well. They were cheap and available up until a few years ago, and since then the pop reports for exs and gold stars have gone up dramatically. I have to imagine this means that a significant quantity of product has been opened over the past several years.
What is clear is that even the print run of 1st Edition Base Set was orders of magnitude larger than the early MTG core sets – Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited – combined. The supply of sealed product of Alpha/Beta/Unlimited is almost non-existent, yet there are dozens of sealed 1st Edition Base Set boxes left. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a confirmed sale of an Alpha or Beta booster box (the former of which weren’t even factory sealed) since 2009. There was an Unlimited booster box posted in the MTG sealed collector group on Facebook around a year ago for $120k, and I haven’t heard anything about it since. And Pokemon collectors generally seem much more eager to open sealed product than MTG collectors, so I would expect that a higher proportion of sealed Pokemon booster boxes have been opened relative to the number of sealed boxes originally produced than in MTG. Not to mention that people rarely bought full booster boxes back in the early days of Pokemon – most product came from loose packs purchased from stores. The same was never true in Magic. But despite all of these factors, I’ve never seen a box break of Alpha, Beta, or Unlimited. And 1st Edition Base Set boxes are still, despite all of this, still dramatically more available than ABU booster boxes. Given that the combined print run of ABU was ~45 million cards, it’s pretty obvious that 1st Edition Base Set had hundreds of millions of cards printed. Perhaps over (or even well over) a billion.
So the print run of Base Set Unlimited must have been unthinkably large. What I’d be curious about is whether sets such as Skyridge/Aquapolis or EX-Series sets had larger or smaller print runs than 1st Edition Base Set. It’s honestly not clear to me.
Chill, dude. As of September 2019 “only” 29 billion Pokemon cards had been sold all-time across the world, so there is no way in hell that a billion 1st edition English Base Set cards were printed. 1st edition made up a very small % of the English Base Set cards that were printed. Shadowless cards were 1 of 7 Base Set print runs and 1st edition only made up a portion of the Shadowless cards that were printed. I don’t have data on how the size of the print runs compare, but anecdotally everyone can tell you that Unlimited Base Set was vastly more available than 1st edition Base Set. All of us around from the 90s saw a ton of Unlimited Base cards back then but most of us never even saw 1st edition Base Set cards back then.
I realize that we’ll never figure out exact numbers, but I feel as though we could very roughly approximate relative print runs. Given your wealth of experience in collecting Pokemon, just how much more scarce is E-Series WotC than something like Base Set Unlimited? Are we talking about Skyridge/Aquapolis having half the print run or 1/100th of the print run? And what about the EX-era – it’s general consensus that the print runs were significantly lower, which is borne out by card/sealed produt availability – but how much more scarce is it than releases like Unlimited Base Set/Fossil/Jungle? And where is the EX-series relative to the late WotC E-Reader sets? I’d be very curious about your (and others’) thoughts on this. I’ve been more heavily into collecting Pokemon for much less time than you and likely many other forum members have been, so I don’t feel I have a good sense of these things.
I’m completely chill lol. It just seems clear to me that the print run of 1st Edition Base Set must have been over 100 million. A billion could be, and given the 29 billion figure, likely is a dramatic overestimate. I completely understand and agree with your point about Base Set. I have thousands of Base Set cards from when I was kid, and I’ve found literally only two 1st Edition cards and just a handful of Shadowless cards.
A print run of 100 million doesn’t seem too implausible, though. Remember, if 1st Edition Base Set had a 100 million card print run, that would still only mean a relatively small amount of any given holo. If the pull rate was 1 per 4 packs, that means that 1/44 cards were holos. Which would mean ~2.3 million total holos. With 16 different holos in base set, that would mean about 140k Charizards, of which the vast majority are either lost or in abysmal condition. Given that there have been almost 2400 PSA submissions of 1st Edition Base Set Charizards (of which, of course, some amount were resubmissions), 140k doesn’t seem like that outlandishly high of a figure. Even if half of the 2400 PSA submissions were resubmissions, that would still mean that ~1% of all 1st Edition Charizards printed have been graded, which doesn’t seem too crazy.
As far as I’m aware there is no exact numbers out there anywhere. So what we can do is go off availability. 1st ed Neo sets. E series. And ex era seem to have the smallest print runs. The largest 1st ed print runs are fossil-gym challenge I believe. But again all we can go off of is availability, popularity, and PSa 10 reports. Once you realize as a collector what the more scarce sets are it gives you a better idea but you asked for a lot of exact numbers. I don’t think there is actual numbers of anything anywhere. We don’t know how many Crystal Charizards are in the world or how many 1st ed base boxes are left etc. Best you can do is about narrow it down like most of us did and go off what you see online. Another easy answer is any set that was originally unpopular had small print runs. E series thru heart gold soul silver wasn’t very popular. But I’m not sure print runs of Diamond and Pearl. Heart gold era. They may be slightly less available because price is still so cheap on those last mentioned sets. I know people barely graded cards from this era
I actually think the math could be done and give some good approximate answers. For sure it’s an approximation. But I can’t think of any better way, and you could grade adjust it. I mean, if you just looked at 9 and 10 rayquazas do you think the pop for those are 2x off from the same grade of base set charizard? Probably not 2x off, and certainly not 5x off. Again, in a situation where there are no available numbers it’s something that could be done to get directional, but not precise, answers. That’s my point.
In terms of A/B/U, sealed product is not common but not nearly as scarce as you think. I personally bought a sealed beta starter deck box and two alpha starter decks in the 2014/2015/2016 timeframe. I unsealed my beta box and sold/traded the decks. I opened one of the alpha starters and traded the others. There is sealed product out there that I had access to. Sealed booster boxes are indeed exceptionally rare in mtg. It’s so hard to verify those I would have never bought one. And it’s really a fools errand to open one and do a box break. The values have always been so high. Openboosters is the only guy I have ever seen open one in the era you are referencing, and his cost basis was the original 1990s purchase price. My good friend Dave Edwards who still has the top PSA Alpha set opened a bunch of product, and I know many others who did too, but it was slightly earlier. Pokemon is at least 5 years behind mtg (i mean it started in 1999 in US vs 1993/4). And it’s very different. But we are in slightly less mature era for pokemon.
Sure, I definitely think it is useful info in some capacity. There are just so many factors that one would have to control for that I’m not sure that the pop report alone is of much use. But in conjunction with other measures? It’s certainly relevant info.
It’s pretty damn scarce. There are a few very large collectors (Brian Nocenti, Preston Cordy, Adam Cai, and a few less public members of the community) who each, AFAIK, still have more than one sealed AB starter in their possession. Openboosters was a pretty anomalous situation, and he’s opened the vast majority of what he re-discovered. The value trajectory of ABU sealed product has been pretty comparable to the trajectory of sealed WotC/EX Era product. Beta starters were readily available for $300-$400 a piece back in ~2008-09. Now Beta starters are an easy $20k, Alpha probably $45k. But starters comprised, by all accounts, much less than half of the print run. The number of sealed ABU starters in existence is almost certainly less than 500, and each starter is really just the equivalent of 2 booster packs (in terms of the number of rares one gets). Sealed 1st Edition Base set packs (either loose and in boxes) are much more common, as far as I can tell.
I don’t think your numbers on the sealed quantity are way off, at least not for alpha. There are big stashes in the seattle area. I know brian and adam well.
Fair enough; I’m sure there are former (or even current) WotC employees with several. Might also be the case with 1st Edition Base Set? Especially since by 1999 MTG was a fully-fledged CCG, I’m sure some (correctly) anticipated that the Pokemon TCG would go on to be comparably collectible and valuable. I do wonder if similar stashes exist for some of the apparently scarce Pokemon booster boxes. There are several EX-era booster boxes that haven’t even hit the market for at least a year (off the top of my head, I haven’t seen EX Dragon and Holon Phantoms boxes for a while). But there have to be lots of sealed boxes of these sets left? The print runs were smaller, but it’s not as though they were limited releases. But by the availability of sealed product, one might be led to think they were. I do wonder if there are individuals with hundreds of boxes of these in their possession. Or if it’s just actually the reality that very few have remained sealed.
“Wizards released its new Pokemon trading card game just six weeks ago, and has presold 125 million trading cards to retail stores – a number company executives said is reminiscent of the early days of Wizard’s flagship trading card game, Magic The Gathering.”
“We’re sold out of our third print run, which hits stores later this month, and based upon strong demand, we’re scheduled to go to a fourth,” said Steven Kam, senior marketing manager for the Pokemon line. “It’s selling 10 times better than we expected, and Pokemon is experiencing the same type of following as we did with the Magic launch.”
“One area Wizards won’t be able to cash in is the Japanese trading card market. The company only has the rights to sell the game in the U.S. and Canada, which may limit the company’s Pokemon growth.”
Interesting. Were each of the Base Set print runs of comparable size? From the article you linked, it sounds like the first three print runs were together 125 million cards (unless there were cards printed beyond those “presold … to retail stores”). Did 1st Edition comprise the entire first print or only part of it? Either way, it seems like I probably overestimated the print run of it.
The first print run was the 1st edition *and* the Shadowless cards. It’s not clear whether there were more 1st edition or more Shadowless cards. The distribution depended on where you lived. My childhood collection includes at least a couple of hundred Shadowless cards and 0 1st edition cards. So my guess would be that there were more Shadowless cards than 1st edition cards but it’s not known.
I’m not going to try to read too much into the information provided but it definitely sounds like the first print runs were generally smaller than the later print runs (once they realized what a phenomenon they had on their hands).
Like I said, your guesstimate of a billion 1st edition English Base Set cards from before was a wild overestimate. Even your 100 million minimum guess is quite the overestimate.
125 million cards or packs is the bigger question. And if you had a exact number divide by 3 because the other two packs doesn’t contain a holo besides for keeping it sealed to look at all those light packs won’t effect the psa holo pops which is what people actually care about