Trying to develop a sense for lots of Japanese price points I’m not familiar with. I’m strong with English cards and have a sense of basically all their values and prices just from osmosis and I can implicitly tell whether a price is good or not just from constant exposure and transacting. I don’t have any of this experience with Japanese cards and it’s like a kick down the stairs to have to start at the bottom and remember what it was like to not know shit.
Kinda fun though.
Use eBay solds to get an idea. Yahoo Japan also has a sold prices search function.
That’s what I do. Also in the habit of watching live auctions and seeing where they end up.
Part of my trouble is that I really like to buy in complete, or nearly complete, sets. This isn’t how many cards sell, especially Japanese cards it seems. There aren’t a lot of visible price points for complete sets. I expected there would be more “complete vending” or “complete corocoro” sets and while there are some there aren’t as many as I expected.
Nothing some time won’t fix.
You can check Japanese store buy list prices to see how they are asking for in Japan. What they actually sell for will be more than their buy price. This works better for higher value items and promos. You can check out card rush’s Twitter account. They post all the time
Thank you, I’ll check it out.
I didn’t turn up many results on Yahoo Japan, which surprised me. Only about as many as there were on eBay. I wonder if I should use different language when searching. I expected there to be a lot more.
Yes, the 2005 medal is far more rare as it’s from the 2004-2005 season, which was the first run of the Gym Finals events. I don’t think they’re worth $5K USD, but there’s definitely a premium over the much-more-common 2007+ variants.
The Ponyta Ishii card seems to be a nametag / badge printed on actual PTCG cardstock. He works a lot with TPCi as an influencer / evangelist so it’s not too out of line for them to print up his lanyard’s name badge for an event on some spare cardstock. Whether you consider it an actual card or not is up to you. Definitely a cool piece of history though!
That is Ponyta Ishii’s business card, it’s not too rare and I think he still gives them out if you happen to meet him.
Does anyone have a ballpark figure for the going price of a Korean 1st Edition Base Booster pack? Am I best looking at recent sales of Spanish/French/German/Chinese? Thanks.
What language are you using when searching Yahoo Japan? Unless it’s Japanese, you’re not going to get very good results.
I use machine translated Japanese and keep it broad. In this case I just searched コロコロポケモン — for example. I got plenty of hits, but not as many as I expected. I was hoping for more complete sets but it’s pretty scattershot.
I could use some help with vending actually. The machine translation is off (ポケモンの販売). Any advice?
buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/t814336132
sealed masters scroll with original pamphlet
There is a thread on efour dedicated to japanese search terms. Personally I’ve developed my own search terms over a long period of time just through trial and error. If google translate doesn’t yield good results then I will try and just over time through browsing find listings that do have the item I’m looking for and then copy and paste from there onto google translate and trim the fat off that doesn’t necessarily belong in a search of that item. If a good amount of that item pops up more than just the item I copied from then I figure I have a decent search setup then. Sometimes it helps to go the extra mile and try different variations of terms for the same item; or copy from multiple variations in listings of the same item, but usually if the translation checks out and items are popping up in good quantity then I’ll just roll with it and check back frequently as I see fit. Good luck developing your own keywords. I personally use bookmark folders; one folder for mercari and one for yahoo. Each folder drops down to about 50 search terms. I probably only visit about 10 searches daily on each site because while its nice to have a broad amount of search terms handy there is only so much you can focus on at once.
Also just a small issue that may come up sometimes it matters if there is a space between words. I can’t remember for which site, but depending on if its mercari or yahoo the search term will work better with a space between words.
Also sometimes you can just search by the card number (with the japanese for pokemon card) so you don’t need the translation, or like for instance one of the best ways to find E series cards is the translation for pokemon card but just with an english letter E afterwards.
Another good solution that might help in the instance of finding a good term for vending (that will help as a strategy for finding other sets as well) is if you search for a character you know is in vending, that probably isn’t pikachu or charizard because they have so many various cards across the hobby, but maybe like a a haunter or something that is in vending, and then if a result comes up that has the vending card of that character, copy the listing title into google translate and trim the fat and see if that term works for vending. I think this strategy of copying from listing titles and using trial and error is probably the easiest way to find the right terms if people haven’t already listed them on the efour thread.
@pizzachu , I know the thread you’re talking about but can’t seem to find it for the life of me. I have even commented in it before. Do you remember the title? I just went through 13 pages of guides searching the word Japanese to no avail. Edit: Finally found it. www.elitefourum.com/t/yahoo-japan-search-guide/13488/1
btw now that im home from work on my PC, here’s what I’ve used for vending.
拡張シート
Thanks a lot.
I’m still learning everything there is to know about these cards. I see quite a lot of partial listings that are probably going to end up my best bet to pick up as many at once as I want. Maybe the different categories (Red, Blue, Green) will be easier to pickup on their own too.
Hi Everyone,
This is going to be a bit of a longer post but I thought it would start some interesting discussion on where different people were at on their own collecting journey specifically in the Japanese Card Market. While I’ve only been in the hobby for a little under the year I’ve dove in pretty deep and have become familiar with multiple sets, unique Japanese promos, and the hierarchy when it comes to specific trophy cards.
My question is targeted to more long time collectors in the hobby in that once you have reached the point where you’ve started to chase rarity not only to decrease your risk of price dropping but also to reach the highest level of collectibles, each purchase takes a sizable portion of capital and therefore time.
As a result do you feel from your own experience that solely saving up to acquire these Japanese trophies/unique promos is the way to go about it, or do you think buying some smaller items in between that you would like to collect, but inevitably take money away from your trophy goals is a good way to keep collecting while you build up the capital?
For what it’s worth there was a recent sale for a NM/M copy via Mandarake auctions that sold for around 225k yen — this could be the same copy, or it could be another. The card is indeed quite rare but 2021 has seen at least three different copies pop up for sale publicly — possibly because of the increased awareness for the differences between variants due to card shops including them on their buy lists. That and the price.
There is also another listing up on Mercari for 300k yen, but this one has some damage to it: www.mercari.com/jp/items/m16075144644/
Master scroll went for $17k. PSA 9 went on YHJ not long ago for around the same price.
Considering master scroll pop report is pretty split between 10s and not 10s (cracking cases aside) this one felt pretty risky for buying from Japan unless you were planning on keeping it sealed like this. I got up at 4am and bid on it until about 14k.
It’s the first raw one I’ve seen in months. Not necessarily my grail card but one that felt somewhat within reach, slipped right out of my hands. Haven’t seen a raw copy pop up in a long time.
Oh well. I genuinely thought it would go for less than the PSA 9 copy.
@serpintaxt now that we’ve seen so many extra copies of various rare cards appearing in the past 24 months there are quite a few high-end trophy collectors who now prefer cards like this to be in their original cases instead of graded.
For this card to still be attached to its original Daisuki Club documentation is probably what saw this one going so high, as not only does it help fight the belief that it could be an extra copy it gives something which most graded copy sellers don’t include in their listings.