Hello! The title says it all. Yes, many of us have monetarily valuable cards, but I was curious about which cards in your collection you value because they make you go ‘ah, there’s a story to go with this one’.
Maybe a collector wouldn’t pick a laundry-washed rare from 2002 over a Moonbreon as their most valuable, but these kinds of cards add value to our collection in their own way.
I’ll list a few examples, curious what everyone has to say:
10. Avalanche Rescue of the Staff Gyarados Promo
In 2020, USPS notified me at 10pm that I had a Staff promo Gyarados card delivered on my porch in the middle of a snowstorm. It caused me to shovel most of my front porch and driveway in a panic looking to see if it was buried in the snow. The next, day the card was nonchalantly delivered to my mailbox. It showed as delivered twice. I still remember this every time I look at the card.
9. The $20 cash in the mail Base Set Zard
When I was a kid, I didn’t really have money to buy cards (also my parents didn’t like me playing with them). There was a site at the time that accepted cash sent PWE for cards. So I secretly snuck $20 out of my mom’s purse and got my first ever Charizard with it. Here it is today:
8. My first ever Zard from a pack
As a kid, because I couldn’t open many packs, the first actual Charizard I found in a pack was Blaine’s Charizard unlimited in Gym Challenge. Although the fighting symbol error annoyed me because I thought it lowered the value, I kept it prominently displayed in my binders for years because it was my only zard. That’s probably why it got a PSA 7 grade lol.
7. The Shining Charizard won by $1.48 over second highest bid
In 2012, I got serious again about finally collecting all the Shining pokemon from Neo Destiny, but I kept losing auctions for the Charizard by a few dollars. Finally, I won this one in a close race, as my maximum bid was only $109.99! Those were different times.
6. The ‘god pack’ before god packs existed
I was quite lucky (or foolish) to have opened a large number (like 16) of Skyridge packs in 2012, as they were selling for around $16 each back then. In one pack I found a holo Raichu, reverse holo Crystal Zard, and a non-holo Raikou (well not a huge pull, but my favorite art). As I had never had 3!! hit cards from a pack before, I thought of it as a god pack at the time. (I didn’t know all Skyridge packs worked this way). Still brings good memories when I look at it in the binder.
5. The misprints hiding in plain sight
I had the shining cards from Neo Revelation chilling in my binder since 2012, but it was only owing to this recent E4 post that I learned that a few of my cards were in fact the double holo variety. This caused me to have a whole new appreciation for my set, and it was fun to share in the excitement with other E4 members. The seller I had used at the time must have opened a bunch, but no one knew what they were back then (and the cards were $9.99 cheap).
4. Meeting the voice of Ash Ketchum
In 2023, I finally got around to meeting some of the voice actors I heard all the time in my childhood. I saw Veronica Taylor at a show in Long Beach, and she was a real pleasure to talk to. She also did her Ash voice a few times during Q&A. I got 2 very memorable autos from her during the show, that I still cherish today.
3. Borrowing pliers to get Midori Harada’s auto
This was well documented in this E4 post, but I was lucky to find Midori Harada just chilling at New York Comic Con 2 years ago. I had to scramble all over the con trying to find one of her cards to sign, and ended up paying some vendor $20 for a nonfoil CGC8 Xatu. Then I had to go to the cosplay corner to borrow a pair of pliers to bust it out lol. She did a great shikishi on it though!
I’ll never forget the mad scramble I had to go through to get this, especially since she does not sign at NYCC at all any more.
2. Chatting with Mitsuhiro Arita for 30 minutes
I got lucky again at NY Comic Con last year as Mitsuhiro Arita showed up at the last minute without much announcement, and I was able to get his autographs on my 1st Edition Base holos without any line (albeit with my wallet very much lighter). The most rewarding part for me was getting to talk to him for a good 30 minutes at his booth since he was not busy at all, and talking about the anime he liked and what he thought of the crazy signatures market today. He even drew me an MTG Black Lotus. It’s a day I won’t forget any time soon!
1. The Blaine’s Arcanine that started a friendship
This is more a personal one for me, as for most this would just be a regular 1st ed Blaine’s Arcanine. But actually, when I pulled this card in middle school, it was my best card for a long time. One day I was looking at it at chess club when another kid came over to talk with me about it, since he was quite impressed. I ended up becoming very good friends with him, through high school and to this very day. In fact, at the end of high school, he even wrote about this Blaine’s Arcanine in my yearbook! 
Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have this card! So, this is a card that I’m unlikely to ever sell. It was one of the few cases of Pokemon turning a friendship into reality for me!
There’s many more cards that I have an attachment to. Particularly, all the cards I’ve commissioned for my Magic the Gathering artist proof project are quite special to me, and I’ll probably keep those for a very long time. How about you? Which cards really jar your memory?
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(1st Edition) … but that photo was taken when I was just starting …
(1st Edition) … From Portuguese “Legendary Duelists: Season 3” expansion. In this expansion, she had 3 variants related to the colour of her name: Gold, Red & Blue. In my collection I have the Gold and Red variants in Portuguese (I’m only missing the Blue one)
