It’s hard to say. Some cards came out of the factory that way. BGS gave a unlimited Zard a 10 with worst corners than that. Lol
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It’s normal. There are a ton of 1st base cards that have lopsided or oddly-cut corners.
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Any thoughts on the auctions?
I thought Hitmonchan for $3500 was a great deal. It seems that if you want to buy 1st edition base PSA 10 holos, PWCC is your best bet. The PSA 9 1st edition base Charizard looked strong and for $5400 seems like a nice pick up. Shining Charizard for $2500 was surprising as it rose again from last time.
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Zapdos ended surprisingly high to me, but overall pwcc is cheap across majority of the cards pretty much
Also interesting to see that shining zard may have overtaken crystal zard
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Blastoise 1st PSA 10 did well even with 2 ending at once!
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@sgbased agreed, Zapdos went higher than I expected too
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The 1st one that closed got over $700.00 more.
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Thick stamp
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I managed to get the PSA9 Hitmonchan for almost exactly 1/10 of the price of the PSA10 listing. I thought that was pretty funny. This disparity between the PSA9 and the PSA10 price is even greater than for the charizard, while the gap between 9 and 10 seems a lot smaller for many of the other 1st base holos such as Nidoking and Zapdos.
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December auctions are up! Some of the notable cards:
- PSA 5 1999 Tropical wind!
- A few PSA 10 1st ed base holos (Clefairy, Gyarados, 2x Venusaur)
- Shadowless Charizard BGS 9.5 Quad+ (10 centering, rest 9.5)
- 2x Grand Party PSA 10
- 1st ed base Charizard PSA 9 and a few other 1st base PSA 9 holos
- Fan Club Eeevee PSA 9
- Fan Club Porygon PSA 8
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Definitely some juicy promos this round.
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The reason the PSA 10 Hitmonchan sells for more than the Nidoking and Zapdos has to do with the PSA population report.
Alakazam - 80
Blastoise - 93
Chansey - 46
Charizard - 118
Clefairy - 61
Gyarados - 76
Hitmonchan - 53
Machamp - 311 (shadowless population is less)
Magneton - 61
Mewtwo - 77
Nidoking - 87
Ninetales - 62
Poliwrath - 92
Raichu - 81
Venusaur - 122
Zapdos - 114
So in terms of ratios (not including Machamp)…
Venusaur - 1.0
Charizard - .97
Zapdos - .93
Blastoise - .76
Poliwrath - .75
Nidoking - .71
Raichu - .66
Mewtwo - .63
Alakazam - .66
Gyarados - .62
Ninetales - .51
Magneton - .5
Clefairy - .5
Hitmonchan - .43
Chansey - .38
Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur obviously get a boost in price relative to their scarcity because of their popularity. On the other extreme, I’ve noticed that Magneton isn’t as expensive as one would expect based on scarcity, probably because it’s not a very popular Pokemon. But for the rest of the cards, the price is mostly tied to scarcity.
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That’s true, though I wonder if they even noticed.
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@hyruleguardian, Fantastic Post! The Blastoise was playable as well, which is why is probably partly why it has a lower 10 pop. Especially since more Blastoise were submitted in total than Venusaur.
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This is going to be quite a competitive auction…thanks for the heads up! 
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Years ago I determined based on the available evidence that the Thick Stamp cards were printed before Thin Stamps and that they were rarer (by perhaps a 1-to-2.5 ratio or so) as well. The combination of firstness and rarity made the Thick Stamps more desirable to me. I also decided I would prefer having uniformity in my base set holo collection rather than different variants. So I’ve only ever purchased the thick stamps.
Although the existence of thick stamps and thin stamps is still fairly esoteric knowledge, I’ve definitely noticed that many collectors go for either a thick stamp set or a thin stamp set (or both in some cases).
Hypothetically speaking, even if 80% of the people collecting these cards did not care about the stamp variant at all, if another 10% of people sought only thick stamps and an additional 10% of people sought only thin stamps, this would drive the price of the thick stamps up relative to the thin stamps because the thick stamps are scarcer. There would be a smallish but tangible impact on the price.
Of course, I have no idea what the numbers are like in reality, but anecdotally I’ve noticed that thick stamps tend to do slightly better than thin stamps in auctions on average.
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I think your numbers are close in my experience though the difference is probably 2 1/2 to 3 1/2. I know when I finished building my sets I ended up with 4 thin 10 sets and one thick 10 set.
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Just for kicks, I just went through every listing of a PSA 10 1st edition base set holo currently available on eBay. I counted 13 thick stamps, 35 thin stamps. Whenever I’ve tried this exercise in the past it always comes out about the same. So yeah, it would be fair to say that the ratio of thin stamps to thick stamps is in the ballpark of 3-to-1.
It’s interesting to think about the ramifications of that. For instance, since we know there are 46 PSA 10 Chanseys, we can guess that there are something like ~12 Thick Stamp PSA 10 Chanseys in existence, which would mean that the highest theoretical number of completed PSA 10 Thick Stamp sets would be 12.
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@garyis2000 are those your sets on the PSA registry?
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So that sounds about right. Several years ago I had about 400 graded 1st Base Holos. Just over 100 were thick. Again confirming the percentage.
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