The winner has been selected! It’s post #37 (excluding my posts), which I believe corresponds to Pikachu connoisseur Quaador!
Thank you so much to everyone for participating, and hope everyone walked away with something to think about after all the great replies from the community.
*Quaador, please dm me your address so that I can mail the prize to you.
I’m Nic, from Singapore. Hope to do my first giveaway here to thank the community for the valuable and selfless advice
The winner will get a**PSA 10 1st Edition Team Rocket English - (Holo) Here Comes Team Rocket!**Team Rocket for me was as iconic and important to Pokemon as Ash and Pikachu - felt it would be a fun giveaway which most of us who grew up with the series will enjoy
My question to you to enroll in the giveaway is: As the Pokemon Card market develops and is increasingly viewed as an alternative investment asset, what is your best investment idea for Pokemon going forward and why?
Hope the question will provide fun, diverse and useful perspectives for the community here. Have fun answering and I look forward to shipping the card below to the winner (free shipping of course)
Deadline:
By 10 November 2017, 2359 SGT
* Note, have brought it forward as I’m flying overseas for work on the 11th and will be away for quite a bit.
**Winner Selection Criteria:**All you have to do is post an answer! I’ll do a random number generator when we reach the deadline, and post number # will get it. To clarify, this opening post counts as post #0. Good luck!
With cards now being in the thousands range easily, my best investment idea is to start buying rarer single cards in PSA casing, even if it’s at a premium. Many on the forums would probably look at this post and think it’s something obvious, but to me it wasn’t in the past because I typically like to buy my cards raw since it was cheaper and grading is a pain from where I am. However, nowadays with lots of “custom cards” and fake 1st edition stamps, I’ve become more weary at buying pokemon cards in their raw form, especially since almost all higher end cards essentially crossed the 4 figure threshold. This doubt will continue as the pokemon collecting community grows, and if you take pokemon as an investment it’s almost absolute to get the cards in PSA grading, as it will improve liquidity of the card and provides authenticity to the buyer. Another good investment idea for Pokemon in terms of this community is probably to have a list of who hold which high list cards to improve clarity and reduce the possibility of scammers trying to sell fake cards to the collecting community.
For me, the majority of my WOTC is raw and now I aim as much as possible to buy my cards PSA graded, especially if the card is more than 100$.
Thank you so much for making this giveaway sgpokecollect
Edit: If it’s in terms of what cards to collect as the best investment, I would go with the lesser known japanese prize cards, like pal city. It’s like 200$ for a set of 7 cards, and the price has not changed in years yet seeing the set online is so rare!
As far as investing in Pokemon going into the future, I think that the cards that offer the highest ROI is buying EX series PSA 10 and 9s. Orginal EXs PSA 10, and Gold star PSA 9s are what I currently “invest” it. As one of the younger folks on efour, I know that us 3rd gen.ers are going to start buying more and more going into the future. Most of kids that got into Pokemon in the EX series are 15-20ish, so once we get out of school and start generating disposal income then bam!
Just some personal stats: for the EX era, my ROI is 56% after 28 months of semi-serious buying. On average, the yearly ROI comes out to around 26%.
Thanks for doing a giveaway! I really like your question!
I believe the Japanese Base Set No Rarity Prototypes will one day explode just like 1st Edition English cards have this year. Can’t take away the fact that they are the 1st Pokémon(TCG)cards printed. Once people realize they’ve been neglecting that fact, they’ll be forced to start demanding them. The supply is very low so prices will be high. Japanese cards are beautiful in every way. Prominent holo pattern, Golden Borders, Finer card stock, Archival text layout, Classic Pocket Monsters rear artwork, perfect color pallet consistency & actually RARE.
Base Japanese and Base unlimited English (all especially in PSA 9) for two reasons.
They are way undervalued now
And
This last year I’ve been getting an increasing amount of calls from my higher end collectors. This has always been a reliable sign of an investment opportunity. Even though I only sell a little on eBay, I have sold about 50 PSA 9 Charizard’s there. That’s crazy. Blast and Venu are selling out and the others will follow.
Any card with at least 4 of these characteristics will be great investments, the more the better.
EDIT : My reasoning behind this is based on demand. Any card that has more than 4 characteristics above had shown massive increase in price over the year and keeps doing so.
I think that buying sealed product from WOTC and the EX series is a great investment. As not only are these products sought after as collectibles but also as product to be opened which will accelerate the increase in price as the product becomes scarcer.
I’ve got a couple of theory’s about what will go up in price I’m the future.
I’m 22 and the odds had it that I grew up in the e-series era. As far as we’ve seen expedition base is the cheapest of the first three sets. It makes sense, no Crystal Charizard right?
However expedition base has is a very iconic set. It has two different artworks of every starter from the first two generations(TWO FLIPPIN CHARIZADS), the option to complete the reverse holo set (that earlier wotc doesn’t have), beautuful holos (and a lot of them), as well as those For Position Only cards (I know some of you will be mad I threw this in here since you can’t open these cards from any ordinary pack but technically they are expedition) that will cost you an arm and a leg to complete.
A complete Expedition masters set PSA 10 which I’m fairly certain currently does not exist, will probably run the lines of 15-20 grand. (I’d love to see what you guys think of that estimate) Expedition has a lot of reasons to increase in price and seeing a PSA 10 holo blastoise going for 200$ blows my mind when one pack costs upwards of 40$.
For my second theory I want to look at Flashfire, specifically mega charizard Y secret rare.
Currently selling for under 50$ in NM condition where as the mega charizard X version goes for something like 90-100$
I understand that people may like the X version better, but strange how the PSA 10’s of this card roughly go for the same as the Y.
The rarety is equivalent and they are both charizard. I’m curious to see what you guys have to say about that one.
Anyways, thank you for the wonderful giveaway.
Great topic to talk about too
(Rant over)
I just bought a PSA 9 1st Edition Lt. Surge’s Magneton for $26 shipped. I think that 9s, in general, are undervalued. You can scoop up a bunch of Fossil, Jungle, Rocket, and Gym 9s (1st and unlimited) for fairly cheap right now. 10s are Gem Mint, but 9s are still Mint.
I say go for some WotC 9s and sit on them for a couple years.
I think you’re going to see diminishing returns if you currently invest in top grade high end cards. Don’t get me wrong, you will get a nice ROI. Possibly 25% or so yearly until whatever the plateau is… but the true winners will be the ones that think outside the box and invest heavily in overlooked and undervalued product.
I would say buy these 9s when they seem underpriced. If you can buy 5-10 9s of a specific sought after card for the price of a 10, it does not make sense… that gap is not going to hold and the market is going to adjust.
If you had given me $20k a couple months ago when I came back to the hobby, I would have bought 18-20 Shadowless 9s or 6 1st ed… In both cases these cards would be worth $30k+ while my 1st ED PSA 10 would be worth… $20k.
I know that’s very short term and one specific case, but there are plenty of opportunities out there. You just have to find them. I’m just a noobie so I’m currently just observing the market and spending about twice the budget I had set in the process. -__-
I really like where everyone’s minds are so far.
One thing I’ve been considering recently is 1st ed base set holos in PSA 7-8.
As the price of 9 is rising at such a rapid pace now I fee like soon the lower grades will be the most accessible option for some and the demand will go up.
Mine is more of a market influence strategy rather than guessing which cards will go up. As all collectible markets are based on public perception I believe this is the best bet. Here is the strategy:
Develop a social media following (easier said than done I know, but it is doable). Once you have a large number of followers, you feature different cards/sets that you believe will go up in value. Since you have a large following, your “market insight” will automatically drive the prices up because the followers will look at those cards and start to buy. Now the market has gone up!
The reason I see this working is Alpha investments has confirmed in his own videos this has occurred with products he has mentioned. Also, Unlisted leaf has unintentionally done the same thing with Japanese holo blocks. Those have gotten much more expensive / have even sold out in the Mandrake stores since he has featured them in his videos.
In my opinion the Cosplay Pikachu cards are a pretty good investment.
Their prices seem to keep on rising especially the sealed mario and luigi boxes. Who knows what they might be worth in a few years down the road
I also really like the OG ex cards and their prices seem to have doubled/tripled these past two years so who knows how far they can go.
That’s a very safe bet my friend. You can’t go wrong buying these at $100-200 each… It shouldn’t too be long before every 9 is $1000+, except Machamp. lol
The lower grades are already very popular, they sell all day and get a lot of bids at auction as well. This is what I was mentioning too… You can buy a $100 holo and be fairly certain it’s going to be worth $500 at some point. I’m not as certain buying a PSA 10 $2000 holo will ever reach the $10k mark in that same time frame.
The high end cards are great, but the room for growth is more limited IMO.
It seems a bit late for the new arrivals, without as much available capital, to take advantage in the investment of the 1st ed PSA 10s, at least for base set. The Jungle and Fossil do seem to have a relatively decent price point still, though recently those seem to be ever-increasing as well. I have no experience with the market other than seeing the prices from afar over time these last several years. I am seeing very sharp increases across the board, so it is difficult to pinpoint the best answer.
As of this moment I’d instinctively go for any 1st ed wotc sealed product, with a personal Jungle or Fossil bias. PSA graded 9s and even 8s seem reasonable still and can only see them increasing from right now. Though I still have yet to make a move on either preferred investment idea.
since you can’t open these cards from any ordinary pack but technically they are expedition) that will cost you an arm and a leg to complete.