Umbreon VMAX without a doubt is the number one set card today, compared to previous generations what are your opinions on where the card stands among the great set cards of the Pokémon tcg history,
I think it’s overpriced
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I think eevee heroes is one of the most coherent sets in a long time (well, only the hits)
Umbreon is obviously a fan favorite but honestly i think all the Eeveelution alt arts are some of the nicest cards ever released
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Good question, I think it should be a good discussion if we compared the ‘hit’ cards from all eras.
Since SM started, the cards are rarer than ever before, though only a handful of those are truly in demand.
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I still have no right call with this card. I don’t know if this as a vivid voltage all over again (at the moment of its release, it was deemed as the best sw&sh set) and reached like $220 a box, then reprints a year later crushed it.
Now, evolving skies is a much better set in comparison but then again we dont know if a new shiny and “better” set will release in the near future.
One think is for sure, this card will always be desirable but justifying the crazy prices with only one year is the trick question.
1400 for a PSA 10 with a 2400+ population is insane, its still in print! I get centering is usually trash, but its not like people are playing with them.
I am very close to selling mine to pick up other things I am interested in.
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I wasn’t around then, so hindsight may not be useful, but Vivid Voltage is a worthless set that has 1 rainbow Pikachu and nothing else. I don’t think it can be compared to Evolving Skies or really any set released after it.
There’s also nothing fundamentally different between rainbow Pikachu and previous rainbow cards, but alt arts returning and continuing is a big deal/game changer. SM tag team alt arts were, weirdly enough, never chased or at least not chased to this extent. In my local group, I saw an old post selling Latias and Latios AA for $10 after release…
Those days are dead and never returning. It is not unprecedented that Japan inexplicably drops alt arts for the first year since they did it for SWSH, but I would be really surprised considering the chase has moved entirely onto alt arts and almost everything else is worthless not only in comparison, but in actual terms too.
@joetehman this is something I was talking about in another thread. People are comparing the population to previous era cards with their sub-100 pop but is that even a good comparison?
I know anecdotal experience is kinda worthless, but for example I have zero interest in ex cards. Are all these new collectors who are already chasing these alt arts suddenly going to not like them? Are they suddenly going to develop an interest in old cards they didn’t grow up with?
I may be biased or inexperienced due to only coming back in mid 2021, but could all the experienced ones on the forum also be biased or rather influenced by that experience?
The card is breaking $500 raw now. I thought it was overpriced at $250 so who knows.
That’s why history is pretty important. At the moment, having a couple of FA, chonky pikachu and such was deemed traits enough for “best set of the moment”.
Of course in retrospective the set is meh but at the moment it was the bomb.
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Yeah, which is kinda weird. Maybe because early SWSH was terrible.
What are the chase cards in the first year?
The most expensive cards are Marnie, Boss’s Orders and Charizard VMAX from the first 3 sets.
Yeah, that is another factor. These alts are the best arts we have seen in a LONG time, and many collectors joining in now don’t have that nostalgic factor of the older era sets and want these, which I get. I still can’t imagine it doesn’t come down at some point. There is a TON of supply being hoarded, ES is in pretty much every product, and being held back by distros (IMO).
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I love the card, along with many of the other Alt Arts. On the English side, I feel somewhat conflicted around the possible supply of these cards long-term. Obviously, ES has been the most popular SWSH set and a lot of people are potentially sitting on a lot of sealed boxes. Even with the low pull rate, I feel there still could be a lot of these Umbreons that will surface over time. I could be wrong though, but just how I feel. Maybe the supply/demand factors will allow it to stay at high prices for years to come.
Vivid voltage certainly felt more interesting at the time. It introduced the amazing rares. There already was plenty of rainbow fatigue at that point, but since there was nothing better to chase it was still top tier. That Rainbow Pikachu was THE card to pull, and that alone propped up the set.
It seems hard to believe that Evolving Skies and Moonbreon could also be viewed with less desire in the future. Yet it is entirely possible. I wouldn’t bet against TPC continuing to innovate and improve.
There does seem to be a pattern of mostly uninteresting first-year sets in both the Sun & Moon and SWSH eras. I wonder if Scarlet and Violet will start the same way. Hopefully not. If that does happen then it could take a couple years for Moonbreon to get seriously overshadowed by something better.
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That’s true but as much as we reference the major attrition rate of all the old sets and the non-attrition of the new ones, the pull rates are insanely different.
You could get multiple Shining, Crystal, ex, Level X Pokemon in a single box.
These days you can’t even guarantee 1 rainbow rare (vmax alt has the same pull rate) in a box and there are so many inside.
Definitely there will be, if it had a 1b print run, there would be around 57,000 total. Is that a small or large amount? Seems both small and massive at the same time, lol. Do they even print 57,000 of those collection boxes? And those promos aren’t even worth $1 lol.
It is definitely possible, especially if there is a new Umbreon alt art lol. But these are on another level than a rainbow recolour of Pikachu. It’s still too early to know how they will hold up but whereas Pikachu was hard to separate from other SM or SWSH rainbows, these are all unique. I would love to see the Neo and E-series Umbreon in textured full art reprints. That might affect this card.
But yeah, if they abandon alt arts again, I think the spike will continue as people gravitate towards the older sets and singles.
Yes but the amount of product being printed today could easily be exponencial in the hundreds compared to back then. Also, with ex, we have years of price history as a backup, it is not a guaranteed but more years, the better it is to predict/stablish something.
Also, we already had the “original alt arts” which would be the S&M era, which ones are better is subjective but which are the first isn’t.
First, before providing (my biased) opinion on Umbreon Vmax, I d like to touch on the population:
If we were to take a time machine and take the task of sleeving and top loading all the “Charizard #4 from 1999 Base set” cards back then, we would could say that we would the equivalent of 15 354 psa 10 (+/- 10% as not all would grade psa 9):
From Pokemetrics:
|PSA 10 Gem Mint 449
|PSA 9 Mint 6,564
|PSA 8.5 392
|PSA 8 Near Mint - Mint 7,949
Total: 15354
To me, the pricing of the base set charizard fetch higher due to conditions not rarity (I m sure the population will grow further ). PSA 10 price is like $8000 , $11000 ? (also not a very liquid card), and a PSA 9 $1 500 with a pop of 6000+.
So for the time being, at this population, I don’t think it’s insane to see Umbreon Vmax being the most expensive card, as I think more people and new generation will be more prone to collect this card. More if the amount of Pokemon collector has increased and will further.
Coming back to Umbreon Vmax, first it’s a stunning card. The day I pulled it, I thought it will be difficult to match its beauty. For me (that’s my opinion), it is in the top tier of the most beautiful card ever made regardless of its price tag.
Regarding its pricing, I agree that the speed of the increase is … well…not healthy … a dark reminder of what we witnessed for vintage (bubble like pattern). I would have seen this price tag being reached in 2-3 years (after few rounds of reprints) not immediately after a reprint took place.
I think Japanese Moonbreon and English Moonbreon are very different creatures, both in terms of design and supply.
For design, a major part of a chase alt art’s appeal is having amazing texture on top of amazing art. Japanese Moonbreon’s texture does a great job of expressing the moonlight and making the card seem radiant. This effect isn’t entirely absent from the English counterpart, but it’s very muted - almost to the point where English Moonbreon seems like a later reprint of the same card.
Which brings me to supply - I think a major reason the English version isn’t as fancy is because they need to mass print. English prints and prints and prints…they can’t possibly have the same degree of detail or quality control, because they’re serving a much larger market. While EH was probably reprinted to an unprecedented degree for a Japanese set, I’m guessing Japanese quality control will hamper their ability to print enough to meet demand (assuming they reprint EH again). That’s likely why earlier EH reprints only resulted in a modest price drop, and later EH reprints did nothing to help prices.
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In my opinion the umbreon Vmax is the ugliest of the eeveelution Vmax alt arts. However, I do understand that many people have bad taste 
.
Either the umbreon Vmax is severely overvalued or the other eeveelutions are undervalued.
Regardless I’m keeping my distance
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Aren’t the original alt arts actually in XY?
BW Shiny Collection
SM Tag Team GX (and SWSH 2021 to a much greater extent) popularised it all
Are you saying the BW shinies are the first alt arts?
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