I was just curious how you guys felt about some of the Japanese hard to find cards turning into promos in English. On a practical level I’m glad to be able to easily get access to cards with cool art that I want, but selfishly I hate seeing their value deplete so quickly.
How about ya’ll?
Which specific cards are you referring to?
The legendary birds stained glass trio, the Mew and Mewtwo alt art, shiny Zoroark gx and shiny Metagross gx…I’m sure there are more but those are the most recent off the top of my head
What about the Mimikyu special box promos, SM-P 198 and 199. Didn’t these get released as blister pack promos (SM162 and SM163) in English?
Are we talking about certain cards here which are already released or announced, or you mean in theory? EDIT: Ah, you already posted about this while I was in the process of posting this.
I personally think it depends on the card and when they are released. For some I honestly wouldn’t want to see them in English. To give an example: I bought the Japanese The Masked Royal full art in PSA-10 for my FA supporter collection. In Japan it’s limited to just 100 copies, and an additional 28 copies in Korean. (The Japanese one is released between July 15 and 30, 2017, and given to winners of the Shining Legends Shield Game events; Korean I dunno.) If this card would now be released in English, the value would plummet and I would feel like I’ve wasted my 3.4k USD (especially since I primarily collect English FA Supporters, and only Japanese exclusives if they aren’t released in English).
If a card that’s released in Japan isn’t limited like that, and the English cards followed within a few weeks/months, then I wouldn’t really have a problem with it. But for cards limited to let’s say < 300 copies (like the HR Mewtwo), I wouldn’t think it’s wise to also release them in let’s say a regular English set.
Greetz,
Quuador
Personally I like it a lot, it’s really nice to be able to buy modern stuff for fun and get an actually cool promo with a few packs to open for cheap! Plus doing that frees up more money for other ventures; though I do think having a few chase cards in each set is necessary.
It conflicts me as I usually want to collect Japanese variants of modern cards but it’s hard to justify a Japanese alternate art Reshiram & Charizard GX when the English variant is 6x cheaper… and I only wanted it for the art to start with!
Alternate art is the answer! Keep the release unique by the artwork. Every modern card is affordable, especially with time (leaving rotation).
I am all for a tin version, but make it a different artwork.
This would hurt the future prospects of foreign language cards even more. I’d say leave them be.
Don’t worry foreign (English) cards are fine! 
I’m not a fan of it.
Love the artwork, but when they make it a readily avalible tin promo, it takes away from the set imo. Instead of this amazing artwork of a full art being the chase card of a the set… its a basic CGI Rainbow rare.
They’ll also release the BEAMS Pikachu and Clone Charizard, if I’m not wrong, in english. That I don’t like, it would have been better for collectors to leave them limited to Japan. The Pikachu was available with a minimum purchase of 2400yen at a BEAMS store (then later at the Pokemon Center) and the Charizard was released with the 7/11 pre-order of the Movie Promo Tin, it was something nice and not too expensive for collectors to seek in japanese :l
I much prefer the Japanese promos such as the Mimikyu special box promos mentioned above. But I don’t mind them getting English releases, although it would be cooler if they stayed Japanese exclusive. Overall modern Japanese cards are just much more awesome and more fun to collect than English. I agree that it is annoying to see various regular Japanese set cards released as promos. It makes the English sets feel incomplete if you have them in a binder. For instance, in English Shining Legends Celebi, Lugia, and full art Zoroark are promos, while they are regular set cards in Japanese. This is just another reasons to collect the Japanese sets instead, apart from the sets not being a bloated random merge of 2-3 distinct subsets.
How do they even pick which ones stay Japanese-exclusive promos?! (Thinking of the Lillie special box now.) It all seems random.
It’s surely best if the Jpn items don’t get duplicated in English. With promos, a great example is Birthday Pikachus. Right after it was released in English the Jpn versions totally tanked. I know this cost me a ton.
To a lesser extent, when set cards were released in English the Jpn cards fell far behind and even though they’re rarer, way minter, and older…they became the ignored stepchild.
So all I’m trying to say, value wise it’s best if our Japanese cards stand alone and aren’t forced to compete with an English release.
This. I think it started with shining legends for me. The last english product I bought was detective pikachu and I regretted it after I found out the GX cards were regular set cards in the japanese set. Sure, the chase cards become much more affordable as promos but it makes opening booster packs less fun and therefore the chase cards less desirable as a collector. I guess there are good reasons why they do this, maybe western buyers need more incentives to buy product.
Imagine a parallel universe where Japanese promos never crossed over to English and where exclusive English promos exist and never cross over to Japanese…
The only reason I care is because when the cards are released in japan they feel like they have a rhyme and reason for how they are released, they feel unique and the feel like chase cards. The biggest offender for me was the full art evolutions cards of pikachu, charizard, blastoise, and venusaur that had a bunch of other cool pokemon like the eeveelutions in the background. This basically caused evolutions to lose the majority of it’s chase cards as they became super easy to get promos…for a completely different set being generations. Also generations had the entire pokekyun set just thrown into it for reasons?
The new collectors chest has 3 japanese promos that had 3 separate releases, now all 3 of them are just lazily being thrown into one product. I find it even more annoying when its the reverse, where japanese promos become set cards. A lot of japanese promos just got thrown into hidden fates, as if that set needed more??
It’s like they want to bring the cards over to english but are too lazy to actually do it properly so they just throw it into whatever new tin or box happened to be coming out next.
Hidden Fates is a great example of English lazily throwing a bunch of Japanese cards into one gigantic set. I agree with @sacari, where the Japanese releases seem to have a rhyme or reason. Hidden Fates has cards from these Japanese sets:
Are you kidding me lol?
Yes! So ridiculous, I was going to list all the extra cards thrown into this already massive set but I decided it was too long for my already pretty long comment.