I appreciate the insight! How does your opinion on 1st Ed. Jungle holos change if we’re talking about raw PSA ~8 quality cards? The situation I’m in: I have complete sets of 1st Ed. Jungle and Fossil (as well as Rocket and most of Gym/Neo). Quite a few of the Jungle/Fossil holos were PSA 8s that I cracked (I still have the labels, of course) and 4 of the Fossil holos in my set were ones that I personally opened (opened 5 heavy packs total, have 2x Muks lol). The ones I opened are all PSA 8-9 quality, nothing that I would expect to get a 10. Does your opinion also extend to cards like those that I’ve described or only to PSA 10s? Because PSA 10s (of Jungle in particular, of course) are pretty low pop, but PSA 8s and 9s are really plentiful. So I’m thinking PSA 8/9 values might not get much higher? But I’ve been proven wrong with Base so I don’t know what to think anymore haha
@zorloth I think it depends on where you think the cards you would rather own are headed. If you think Jungle/Fossil growth will outpace those cards, then waiting will give you more buying power. Opposite is also true if those cards increase faster than Jungle/Fossil. If they grow at the same rate it’s a wash. The point being it’s all relative.
It’s kind of like the fallacy of upgrading houses. If you buy a house for 100k and it appreciates to 200k, you can’t just go out and buy the house that was 200k at the time you bought yours because that one is now 400k. Hopefully that makes sense and is not a terrible analogy.
Very solid advice. Re: the cards I’d rather own – I have no clue where they’re headed. All I know is that they haven’t increased in price much recently and they feel like more bang for my buck. But if you had asked me last month I would’ve said they offered more bang for your buck than Base Unlimited. And now Base Unlimited is through the roof and the cards I’d rather own haven’t moved at all – so clearly my opinion does not reflect how the market feels 
.
For Jungle/Fossil, I also honestly don’t know where they’re headed. I doubt that they’re going to crash or anything anytime soon, but the market is so frenzied right now that I don’t want to miss my opportunity to sell. $10k worth of cards in this current market could be $20k next week or could be $5k next week. Early WotC is just a shitshow lol.
Can you tell when Logan entered the chat?
I wonder what happened in 2016? The trend seems to be similar with key phrases like ‘charizard’ or ‘pokemon investing’ with a spike similar to now in 2016.
PokémonGo…
Ah, I forgot that thing exists almost Thanks!
I see non-holos for nearly every set (maybe not 1st ed base) crashing hard. Must be millions of these sitting around in houses.
I’d be thrilled if they did because I would love to finish my base set/challenge/heroes graded non holo sets.
I think people overestimate what percentage of 20+ year old cards have been maintained in PSA 8+ condition. Agree that I don’t foresee much of a bump for lower grade/played cards, but I still think demand for Jungle/Fossil commons will outpace the added supply from binder finds.
PSA 8+? A ton. Over the past several months, I bought out a lot of the inventory of a guy who owned a sports card store that close down like a decade ago. I bought out all his e-Series and EX Series reverse holos and some other random stuff, but he also has a metric fuck ton of Base through Fossil. By that I mean that he was over 500 copies of certain cards. Everything of his was opened, not sleeved, put into those giant white card boxes, and was part of the singles inventory at his store. Every single card I’ve ever received from the guy is PSA 8-10 quality. He still had ~320 Base Unlimited Charmanders as of just a few weeks ago, but someone bought him out of those (if that person is reading this – good going lol). But he still has 500+ copies of quite a few different Base Set commons and plenty of most uncommons and non-holo rares, too.
So this is anecdotal, but you’re overestimating how difficult it is to maintain the condition of non-holos. Remember: none of this guy’s stuff was sleeved. It just sat in storage boxes for 2 decades. All of it is PSA 8+ condition. Happening upon this guy made me realize just how much supply of mint non-holos there is lol. I can only imagine how much of it people like Charlie Hurlocker or Gary have…
For the common sets like Base Unlimited, Jungle, Fossil and Rocket, yes.
I think Shadowless is safe. People just undervalued the cards for years and now they are finally catching up. I don’t know about everyone else, but I have bought tons of raw Shadowless non-holos over the last several years and have had difficulty finding a large amount of PSA 10 candidates.
The Gym sets are kind of on the border. They don’t have as much supply as Base/Jungle/Fossil/Rocket, but I also think many of the non-holos in those sets are less popular in general. A decent amount of people don’t like the whole “Gym Leader X’s Pokemon” thing, which wasn’t quite as unique as Dark Pokemon in Rocket. However, because of the lower supply, I think the Gym non-holos stand a better chance of holding (or at least not crashing as hard) as Base/Jungle/Fossil/Rocket.
Neo is another story. The non-holos in these sets have always been slept on, in my opinion. They are actually pretty scarce (even ungraded) relative to the other WOTC sets, and people LOVE the artwork of the Neo sets. Neo Destiny non-holos in particular have strong value (the Eeveelutions, Light Ninetales, etc.).
This belongs here. A nicely placed exclusive transaction article. $375K 1st ed box sold. More mainstream outlets should pick it up in the next 48 hours.
“Camillo believes he is “catching early wave” with investing in the card collecting market.”
“Camillo believes his record $375,000 purchase price will be eclipsed shortly”
Paying 8x market price last and 2x last sold. Sounds more like the greater fools theory here.
I’m pretty sure this was just a well-timed publicity stunt. Even in the tweet he posted about it he refers himself in third-person as “Trader Chris Camillo” and the article synopsis links straight through to his personal website.
It’s great that stuff like this is happening, but it’s going to make valuing the box a bit difficult as I can’t see an actual investor* paying anywhere near that amount any time soon.
* Note that by actual investor I mean an investor in Pokémon rather than someone buying in to raise awareness of a product/brand/figure.
1st edition Base Box will easily be $1 Million in the coming years.
Woah…and Collectibles Guru was the seller (but he’s now Crypto King?):
www.instagram.com/_TheCryptoKing/
Also: “Camillo believes there are only 40 to 70 unopened boxes of 1999 1st Edition Pokémon cards.” I think there are more than 40 boxes in the hands of E4 members alone? haha
Wow, that’s unreal. Point taken, but I still think that it’s unfair to compare cards from a dealer (even if they were just sitting unsleeved in a box) vs. the millions of played cards sitting around in binders / trashed. I guess only time will tell; it’ll probably be a slow burn regardless due to how backlogged PSA is haha.
Yeah, I agree that the average Base Unlimited card is probably in crappy condition. The issue is that soooooooo much of it was printed. To put it into perspective: nearly 22 years after the release of Base Set and during one of the most insane bull markets in the history of collectibles, Troll and Toad (by far the biggest dealer in the game) still doesn’t even have the the vast majority of Base Unlimited non-holos on their buylist. Same with Jungle/Fossil/Rocket. And it’s not just Troll & Toad – it’s all the big vendors. They won’t touch non-1st Edition early WotC non-holos with a 10-foot pole. But look at buylists for Neo through the EX Series – vendors buy basically everything at above bulk rates. Despite the fact that those sets are vastly less popular. And this isn’t just some weird Troll & Toad thing – every vendor that I’m aware still won’t pay above bulk rates for pretty much every (if not every) Base Unlimited non-holo. The market has been beyond saturated.
I have no doubt that there are vendors with over 1000 of each Base Unlimited non-holo. The sports card store I mentioned was, as far as I can tell, a pretty run-of-the-mill store (when it was in business). It’s nothing like Northwest Sportscards or the like. And I haven’t even mentioned MTG vendors/comic book stores. Many of these guys picked up Pokemon when it came out. Most stores don’t list their entire stock on their website…except for ABUGames, which is a decently large MTG vendor (but far from the largest). And they have over 5000+ (yes, 5000) copies of certain cards in stock. And I don’t see any reason to believe that Pokemon was any less mass-produced. I have no doubt that there are people sitting on incomprehensibly large inventories of cards. Look at Gary (King Pokemon) on this forum – the guy won’t reveal much about how much bulk he has because (and he’s explicitly said this) he doesn’t want consumers to lose confidence in the market.
I didn’t realise the seller was Collectibles Guru. I’m adamant that his box is a reseal and the buyer got suckered in.