Its funny how over time so many things change, with PSA Pop reports, 20 years of the market being established, photographic evidence of miscuts/cards that exist/didnt exist, knowledge over E4 and Youtube. This got me thinking, what are some of the stuff you believed in as a kid or in your earliest days that now make no sense and some of which are laughable!
Ill start:
Laminating your shinies was the best way of protecting them from scratches.
-Writing your initials on the back of the cards stopped the older kids from stealing your cards.
-Base set 2 cards are 2nd edition stamps, it went in order of 1st edition, then 2nd edition, then unlimited.
-If you picked the booster pack with the artwork of the type you was after you had a better chance of pulling it (I got a venusaur base set pack to try and get venusaur)
I have to agree with number 4 but some are quite cool like Rayquaza and Metagross and a few others. But for the most part I prefer ex’s. Maybe that will change once I buy some gold stars
Probably 7 year old me assumed a lot of things that were all over the place, but I don’t remember a whole lot of them.
One thing that comes to mind is that I didn’t really understand the concept of set numbers. So I thought Alakazam was the rarest of all cards, because your chance of pulling it was 1/102.
my friends and I believed that my Japanese fossil mew was the only one in the world and was worth thousands of dollars! I had kids wanting to trade me charizards all day but I wouldn’t let it go
I too believed Legendary Reverses were totally fake. I still to this day don’t really like Legendary collection because it seems in my mind that it’s like counterfeit-esque, lol.
I guess it didn’t help that I never saw or purchased a legendary booster pack so… I never understood how a kid was supposed to even know back in the day. I didn’t use the internet to lookup Pokémon at that time
The higher the HP, the rarer the card. I remember that one kid owned a Wailord ex from Ex Dragon. Everyone at my school believed it was one of the rarest cards ever made.
Goldstars were just regular holos with a gold star. I remember that someone offered a Treecko gold star for a not so rare ex-card of mine. I think my response was something like: “Treecko has 70hp and two low attacks, are you crazy?”
Something similar I believed when gen 2 was first released: Tauros evolved into Miltank. (And I actually thought the same again when I first saw Bouffalant… )
I also agree with three earlier comments: as a kid I also thought the Legendary Collection Reverse Holofoils were fake. But this had an extrapolated reason for me personally, because:
I bought my Legendary Collection booster pack on a secondhand market.
It was an error pack containing the Common Slowpoke twice in the same pack.
The artworks in the pack were reprints from earlier sets, so I thought all cards were fake.
Some other things that come to mind:
More cards > Holofoil cards (which is why I traded my first holofoil I pulled away for three non-Holos Although I was the only one to believe this, since everyone else preferred the holofoil cards)
The 152nd Pokémon was called ‘Egg’. I wasn’t fully aware ‘egg’ meant, well… egg (‘ei’ in Dutch), since I barely knew any English at age 7. I just heard some egg-shaped Pokémon called Egg would be the Pokémon after Mew. They were most likely talking about the egg Ash had in the anime, which later hatched to Togepi.
There was a rumour going around my neighbourhood in 1999 that in pokemon red/blue, Charizard would evolve into a Pokemon called “Charcore” at level 70 something, I’d never heard of this mythical creature and tried my best to find him, but no luck
www.elitefourum.com/t/the-pokemon-playground-theories-thread/25969/1 Not too a long ago I made a short thread on this topic with my great story of believing there was such thing as a “cyber pikachu” feautured only in the Japan version of the anime. To this day I find it funny, but man at the time I was so gullible haha
Dark Raichu was a misprint I actually believed that. Didn’t learn about it being a secret rare until waaaay later
Also thought No symbol Jungle holos were fake… I had multiple sets of all of the holos but I threw them all away when some kid I knew told me they were fake…
(Interesting how we got the No symbol holo packs/Boxes here in the Middle East )
Card set number = your card/total number of that card printed. I couldn’t figure out why all my friends had the same card as me.
Mew truck in original pokemon games
Thought ho-oh in the first episode of Pokemon was just some fancy fearow or something. Only found out it was ho-oh well into adulthood.
I’ll edit more in if I can think of any others.
edit: person below me reminded me of another
5.) I thought you could join team rocket by losing to the guy at the top of cerulean city (nugget) bridge. I thought if I joined I could catch trainer pokemon…
Me and my friends always thought Japanese cards were actually Chinese cards. Didn’t even know Pokemon was from Japan…
The more HP, the better the card is. Highest HP wins!
Ancient Mew is the most valuable card ever.
If you lost to a member of Team Rocket in the gen 1 games, they steal all of your pokemon. I immidiately turned off the game if I lost to prevent it from happening.
You could get stuck at S. S. Anne if you weren’t quick enough.
)
Although I was the only one to believe this, since everyone else preferred the holofoil cards)
I actually believed that. Didn’t learn about it being a secret rare until waaaay later
)