Credit to @shizzlemetimbers for the idea! He made a post for gyarados on instagram which lead to a discord discussion and thus I have made this thread.
My favourite pokemon is salamence. However i would need to do more research to discover the rarest variants as really, there aren’t many rare ones. I believe it will come down to conditional rarity for this pokemon.
I mostly want to hear total released numbers but if you feel like sharing conditional rarity numbers that would be cool too.
Thanks
Really fun thread idea! Here are my Mewtwo’s, I’ll have to do Blastoise later. Btw this site is nice to look at the art for a specific pokemon: mewtwo ‹ PkmnCards
Here are my Mewtwo choices:
1st Ed Base - I will always love Shadowless cards. To this today I get excited seeing a shadowless card.
Mewtwo black star. Another Nostalgia choice. Love the original sugimori design.
Rocket’s Mewtwo was the first card with 3 attacks. I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking it was crazy.
Mewtwo EX. Original mewtwo ex card, and I believe the same design from Super Smash Bros Melee.
Mewtube. Absolutely brilliant desing.
Honorable mention, the new pogo Mewtwo is a solid concept.
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Think you read the thread wrong pratte. Nice favourites but the idea was for top 5 rarest 
Mega-Pinsir is a pretty rare card, some would even call it impossible to find…
I put all that time into the post but went full boomer. 
Put quite a bit in myself and then realized i dont actually know what the rarest ones are so ima let someone else go for it 
(rayquaza)
That’s incredible! I used to play SSBM a lot with a friend back then, playing as Mewtwo mainly. I was never good at the game but I loved spamming the Mewtwo special attack (big purple ball) blasting everybody (and my friend) out of the map!
I just realised now that the EX Mewtwo looks like they’re casting a purple ball as well! Now I have a real reason to chase this EX card but in a better condition. What a beautiful card!
Hmm, my favorite is Pumpkaboo, and I don’t keep up with Japanese promo releases. So as far as I’m aware, the rarest Pumpkaboo cameo would be the Art Academy Gourgeist. After that the English XY Base Pumpkaboo 1st-4th stamped tournament promos would be the next rarest unless there’s a cameo in unaware of.
For Ampharos, the rarest has got to be the For Position Only Ampharos. Beyond that, most Ampharos are set cards with the occasional promo. That said though, some Japanese sets had 1st Edition and unlimited printings, but the unlimited printings were barely printed in comparison. Most of the Ampharos cards from that era in general are extremely difficult to find in unlimited.
I also loved this idea so much I stole it from @shizzlemetimbers a few days ago and did my own list for the Top 5 Rarest Torchics 
Numbers 4 & 5 could easily be flipped, but I suspect a lot of these lists will be educated guesses since we usually only have official distribution numbers for trophies and some select promos. But, from my experience hunting them down these are the Top 5 rarest appearances of the chick in the TCG. (Not counting unofficial TCG products or error cards. List does include Cameos and Jumbo cards but no Jumbos are particularly difficult to source.)
Some honorable mentions are May’s Torchic 037/ADV-P and a ton of foreign language printings I am sure are very hard to find here in the states. Most promotional cards from Korea and Russia are very hard to come by in the US.
crazy that gold star torchic isn’t there! super rare
bUT tHe PoP iS oNLy 17
patiently awaits to see if Scott includes Protostoise on his Top 5 
Piplup, my love! There are quite a few notably rare Piplups and cards with Piplup cameos, namely the following:
1. San Diego Comic Con '07 Stamp
There were only 6 ever given out to vendors at a distributor’s meeting in 2007, as far as I’m aware. A private sale was reported sometime around 2011, but other than that, I haven’t seen much talk of this print anywhere.
2. Tropical Wind 2007
The 2004 Tropical Wind was mentioned already in this thread, but the 2007 version has a Piplup in the illustration, so I’ve got to touch on it. There are different stamped copies, with the Finalist and Semi-Finalist having roughly 6 copies printed each.
3. Gizamimi Pichu / Spiky-eared Pichu
Technically number 3 is two cards, but they have the same story. These were drawn by Shunsuke Takemori, Kindergarten winner of the 2009 Pokémon design contest (left) and Keita Mizuno, Telebi-kun winner (right) of the same. Although it was advertised that 100 copies of their own design were supposed to be sent to each winner, it’s unclear whether or not this happened, and winners were instead awarded a different amount of cards from all winners.
4. Illusion’s Zorua
Much like the Spiky-eared Pichu, these two cards were drawn by winners of the 2010 Pokémon Card Design Contest- Mayumi Fujimura (left) and Izumi Sakaga (right). Each winner received 200 copies of their original design.
5. Italian Pokémon Day Promo
Is this actually the 5th rarest Piplup card? Who knows- its distribution is shrouded in a bit of mystery. As far as I’m aware, this card was given out as a promotional card during Pokémon Day in Italy in 2008, and any other information on it is difficult to find.
It’s a very interesting topic since it takes a lot of time to research and a lot of the rarest culprits would not be totally obvious outside someone who collects their favourite species. I’ll copy and paste from my insta post:
@jonbo if you include cameos, Ampharos appears on a very rare card which I would easily put it at no. 1, I wonder if you can guess? But I think it would take some sort of feral gator genius whose 1st edition thought was I wonder if this deck lives up to Mary’s request…
Can you make more YouTube videos? I’ve watched all your videos like 10 times and I need MOAR!
I’m one away from this rare + niche xy10 unlimited set. I know who has it, but I don’t know his contact info. 
Hard to say, for both Pikachu and Seviper. 
The rarest of both are obvious, if we only look at official releases.
(Note1: if we also include unofficial Sample cards and such, SNAP Pikachu would not even be in the top 5 in terms of quantity, since there is the 1 of 1 Japanese 1996 Sample card; 1 of 2 English Matchprint card; etc…
Note2: For Seviper I did include cameos; for Pikachu not. (Similar as my own collection goals.) Otherwise the Pikachu would just be a top 5 of Trophy cards. 
)
Seviper: Japanese unlimited edition World Champions Pack - unlimited edition WCP (unknown quantity, but most likely less than 3k)
Pikachu: Japanese SNAP Photo Contest from 1999 - 20 copies + some extras
For Seviper it’s obvious again, since the same unlimited edition WCP set also contained the Battle Frontier trainer card with Seviper cameo.
For Pikachu on the other hand, I’m not too sure in which order to put the rest. Second place is probably the Japanese Art Academy card of Ginga (Pikachu Emotions). All 22 Art Academy cards have 100 available copies + extras, But the Pikachu Emotions AA card is the only AA card that has yet to pop up even once, so I’d consider it the rarest of the 12 AA Pikachu cards. (For the sake of this top-5 however, let’s just put all 12 Art Academy Pikachu cards at second place, even though some of them are a lot less rare than the number 3-5 placements below imo.)
For Seviper I don’t really know beyond these two. Probably mostly just French RHs and the French EX Sandstorm Holofoil Rare.
For Pikachu, I’d say the German Birthday Pikachu is rarer than all but two of the Art Academy Pikachu cards. Arguably, the German Flug/Surf Pikachu and Spanish Pikachu Volador/Surfista are rarer than the German Birthday Pikachu, but rarity is not just about quantity, but also about demand vs limited supply. Although I’ve seen four different German birthday Pikachu in my eight years of collecting, and just two of the German/Spanish Surfing/Flying Pikachu promos, the German birthday Pikachu was only given at some German tournaments back in the day from what I’ve heard (not sure if it’s a top X price or participation card, though). Either way, I’d estimate roughly 75-400 of them were given, although only a handful have emerged and a lot of people from Germany aren’t even aware of its existence. (For the sake of this top 5, let’s put the roughly equally as rare German/Spanish Surfing/Flying Pikachu in this same number 3 spot.)
I dunno…
Not enough rare Seviper cards: next is probably the French RH EX Holon Phantoms or French SM46 STAFF-stamped promo 
Too many rare Pikachu cards: Japanese unlimited edition E1 (couple hundred copies); Glossy Keiji Kinebuchi lottery promo (2k copies); Solid Golden 20th Anniversary Base Pikachu (couple hundred copies); French & Italian SM190 stamped Detective Pikachu promos (only a couple thousand copies due to packaging errors); Japanese 102/DP-P promo (~10k copies probably); WB Creator Pikachu (5250 copies); French Shadowless Jumbo Base Pikachu (couple hundred copies); Teach Set Pikachu of July 2011 (couple thousand copies); Event Organized stamped 175/XY-P promo (probably <300 copies); etc. etc.
Greetz,
Quuador
Not sure how it stacks up against what I expect is a random selection of shortprinted foreign and possible cameos?
The rarest card I actually give a shit about is a gem mint EX Emerald Dusclops. Zero BGS 9, 5’s or 10’s, 3 CGC 9,5’s with lackluster subgrades and 19 PSA 10’s. I can’t remember seeing a raw one for sale that reflected anything better in recent years, and the PSA 10 copies vary a great deal.
I assume you’re talking about the Mary’s Request from the Feraligatr Constructed Starter Deck, but are 1st edition versions of the deck really that rare? I had no idea.
Also I totally forgot about the matchprint cards, there is an Ampharos one of those as well and I believe only 2 (?) exist.
