I say 500% because i’m assuming at some point the price will fall which will disincentivize people to grade them. Obviously if everyone were to grade every gem mint candidate the pop would grow much more than 500%.
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Sure, but I think the incentive will likely remain high enough to grade for quite a while. It looks like Charmanders are selling for $400 to $500 right now, and I think price memory will keep it from falling below $100 for quite a while. So I have to imagine there will still be plenty of incentive to grade it in a year, even if the price if 1/5th of what it is now.
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That’s fair, but it also takes time for the pop to increase. I was more speaking in the next couple years while im guessing you are speaking more for the long term. In 25 years time, I agree that the pop will increase much more than 500%.
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I was speaking more about the next few years, so I guess we will just have to wait and see. Like, earlier this year I bought out the e-Series and EX Series reverse holo inventory of a closed-down sports card store that has a small (but publicly accessible) internet presence. And looking at their inventory right now, they alone have 300+ Unlimited Base Charmanders (and a good bit less Squirtle/Bulbasaur for whatever reason, but still 100+ of each) in stock. And this is for a store that has as much e-Series commons in stock as Base set commons. And if a random small sports card store could’ve opened enough Expedition/Aquapolis product to get hundreds of each common, then I can only imagine how much Base Unlimited was opened up by card stores across the English-speaking world. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were individuals who could by themselves grow the pop report by 500%.
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Thank you, will post here in the future.
@phib
‘Time will tell on unlimited base set starters, but I wouldnt be surprised if the population of 10’s each went up 500%. Personally, I threw in 15 9/10 candidates of each with my latest submissions and I have no where near the supply of the big players in this hobby.’
I think with a lot of peoples ‘mint’ base bulk, did they sleeve the cards when they opened them? How mint are they really. To get a good amount of 10’s, would they not have had to sleeve them up straight out of the pack?
Agreed, I expect the supply to grow quite a lot. But I don’t think these cards will be cheap as the demand is so wide as you say. Also I think people are over-estimating the amount of psa10 quality raw base unlimited pikachus, charmanders etc. Most of the so called ‘mint’ bulk will have been in boxes unsleeved getting scratches and wear for years now. The best source of truly mint non-holos like these are the sealed Base decks.
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Are these base singles pack fresh and put into sleeves straight away after opening? If so, what price are they charging per card? If these cards are truly pack fresh, put into sleeves and only a few dollars I would buy them all.
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A quick price comparison:
Price: $200-$300(est) - 1999 Base unlimited Pikachu PSA10 - 505 population
Price: $280-$360 - 2016 Pokemon Japanese Expansion 20th Anniversary CP6 Charizard PSA10 - 2164 population
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Yeah, his whole inventory (or all the cards I’ve gotten so far from him, at least) is pack fresh. I think he opened a ton of packs for singles when his store was still open. I believe he does 50 cents for commons and 1 for uncommons. I’m still contemplating whether or not to buy out a lot of his inventory. It’s a lot of work and money to lay down, I have very little interest in early WotC-era, and I don’t know what the market for this crap is going to be like in a year. In my view, these PSA 10 Base Unlimited Charmanders shouldn’t be worth more than $20. And I wouldn’t be shocked to see them get to that point if someone really does flood the market (someone may have 5000 of each Base common at PSA right now for all we know). But if I decide against buying him out, I’m happy to give you his info 
.
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Absolutely not. Did anyone else buy from kenlar-7029 on eBay while he was still selling? He liquidated his massive, 100k+ card collection on eBay earlier this year. If so, you’ll know this. He cards were all just stacked up in binder sleeves and his stuff was as mint as gets. I bought a large portion of his collection, so I can attest to this. Non-holo Pokemon cards are much more durable than people think. Consider the fact that if you open, say, an Expedition booster pack right now, that 75%+ of the non-holos will grade PSA 10. Despite the fact that the cards likely shifted around a ton over the past 20 years.
Remember also that a lot of the big inventory of non-holos is from former card shop owners. These were for-profit enterprises run by adults – you can bet that they mostly kept their cards in mint condition (this is my experience at least).
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@zorloth ,
Definitely interested but understand if you would prefer to keep to yourself. 50 cents sounds like prices from 1-10 years ago for good quality pack fresh sleeved cards like Pikachu and Charmander. I even bought a bunch of dodgy Pikachus from trollandtoad for a few dollars a piece (rather regrettably lol). Other than that I have been hunting pack fresh base unlimited cards, but also Base 1999-2000 cards wherever I can find them for a few dollars a piece.
Bit of a gamble perhaps! If a bunch of people have thousands of PSA9/10 base unlimited Pikachus/Charmanders/etc at PSA right now and the number goes up from like 500 to 20k psa10’s I might be left slightly out of pocket. 
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@zorloth ,
Fair point about the shop owners. It sounds like you have more experience dealing with such people, I pretty much only buy from eBay and Instagram so don’t have much experience of the bulk old shop stock people… Well within the next year we will be experiencing the big test of these base unlimited cards. Now that they are going for a few hundred dollars in psa10, large amounts of the bulk mint cards out there shall likely be unleashed upon PSA with full force. Lets see what they got! 
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Most card stores that primarily deal in sports cards, in my experience, just have set prices like that for all cards. I paid $2 per reverse holo – regardless of whether or not it was a Skyridge Pikachu or an Expedition Meowth. The people who ran these sorts of stores never had interest in Pokemon – they only carried it because it was popular.
And oof, don’t try to get PSA 10 quality non-holos from Troll & Toad lol. Base Unlimited non-holo starters/Pikachus have already been bought out from TCGPlayer from better vendors, but there’s still a good amount of stock for random commons/uncommons on there. And some of these vendors I know firsthand have very minty cards. With some trial and error, I’m sure you’ll be able to find out which ones – that’s probably your best bet for finding minty Base Unlimited cards. Finding large, private collections is a very difficult thing. There’s a reason why many of these larger stores spend millions of dollars on search efforts. If you just want minty base commons/uncommons, though, there are still plenty you can just buy from the right vendors (and for less $1 each, generally).
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@zorloth ,
Haha yeah, I didn’t realize that Trollandtoad Near-Mint cards were effectively a meme at the time.
$2 for reverse holo Skyridge, Expedition mint bulk is epic. I would have loved to buy 1000 of these or something to sit on for the future with a mind to getting graded. If you buy the right bulk in the right condition, so much money can be pulled from it a few years down the line. Of course a few years ago you could buy a lot of things cheap in comparison to today. I will look out for some better vendors thank you. 
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I wonder if there is a way to estimate the total number of unlimited starters by modelling the pop growth of 1st ed starters over time. Since 1st ed base starter pop growth is clearly much farther along to its “final state”, having progressed much farther along and nearing a flatline in growth (because there are fewer copies left ungraded), if one could fit a curve to this 1st ed pop growth over time, maybe that same curve could be used to estimate how far along we are in the unlimited pop growth, and thereby get an estimate of how many more raw ungraded unlimited copies there really are out there. (I guess some kind of curve that looks like a log curve, but with an actual horizontal asymptote might work because there is an upper bound?) I hope this makes some sense because I am not too sure myself. This could easily be a really dumb idea because maybe it isn’t valid at all to fit the graded pop growth curve of a 1st ed card to the graded pop growth of an unlimited growth to the very different demand profiles of both cards affecting the frequency that the cards will have been graded over time.
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I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think you even need to look at the pop growth trends of 1st Edition starters. For all intents and purposes, zero Base Unlimited non-holos have been graded. The 800 or whatever of a given Base Unlimited starter have been graded is negligible relative to the total supply. Remember that 4x of each starter/Pikachu were in specific theme decks. And an additional 4x Charmander were also included in every 2-Player Starter Set. And contemplate how widely released Unlimited Base was. There was so much printed that it was still available for less than MSRP a decade after it was released.
I’m pretty confident that the number of each starter in existence is well into the tens of millions. There’s little use in comparing the Unlimited starters/Pikachu to 1st Edition Base because 1st Edition Base Set didn’t have theme decks/starter sets. So even if the ratio of Unlimited to 1st Edition Base printed was 10:1, that would still vastly underestimate the actual supply of the Unlimited starters.
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@coelacanth for some place to start at… ~2,000,000 2 player starter sets were printed and Charmander was a playset (4x) inclusion. Each starter and pika were in the theme decks as well. Unlimited Charmander is probably the single most printed Pokemon card in existence at well over 10,000,000 copies. Surely hundreds of thousands at minimum are still mint hell that many are probably still sealed but many of those may never be opened too.
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I guess my main hope is that almost all of the base unlimited non holos were not taken care of in sleeves and are therefore less than psa10.
Will be an interesting next couple of years looking at the bulk non holos anyway.
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Ah, I see. I guess I got a little too excited when in reality, the comparison isn’t valid (also thanks @gottaketchumall as well for helping me to understand - I should have referenced your print run estimation thread before posting). I guess it would be a bit like trying to extrapolate the life an infant from the life of an aging adult from an entirely different background - not much sense to it.
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Surely the vast majority the non-holos are not in PSA 10-quality condition now. But even if the vast majority aren’t, that could still mean a few million PSA 10-quality copies . If you were planning on investing in them, don’t lol. Think about the fact that 20+ years after it’s released, Troll and Toad still doesn’t even have almost any Base Unlimited non-holo commons/uncommons on their buylist (not even the starters).
Base Unlimited was printed to shit. Of course, there’s also an insane amount of demand for it. But there’s too much supply for it to be ‘investible.’ This is the reality for the vast majority of set cards. The exceptions would be cards for which there is very little sealed product left and for which PSA 10 condition is very hard to maintain. There are no non-holo set cards that meet this criteria. Some holos do, however. Holos that were opened 15+ years ago are highly unlikely to have been maintained in PSA 10 quality condition. Holos can get scratched so easily, and many are scratched even straight out of the pack. Compare that to non-holos, which are much easier to maintain the condition of (even if stored/preserved suboptimally) and for which most come out of the pack in PSA 10 quality condition. PSA 10 non-holo set cards (or pretty much any set cards, honestly) aren’t investible, in my opinion.
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I bought lots of cards from them. Quite a few 9s already, but my ex cards have yet to be graded. When i first discovered them it was because I was looking at sold listings. I found a Mint copy of Rayquaza that sold for $300 when they first started. Whoever that was, is a lucky SOB. 8, 9 or 10 for $300 is downright theft.
it was interesting how they were stored. I’d say a lot of the cards were either mint or lightly played. They apparently had kids who played the game at tournaments. The cards were either used in decks or they were in the binder.
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