What are your unpopular opinions in pokemon?

[inertgeometry]

@BANKS

Thank you for taking the time to go through each of my points. After reading your analysis, I realised that we can eliminate the species popularity assumption from our discussion by instead analyzing the JP rayquaza pop and comparing it to other rare, shiny rayquaza cards.

Card	Total Pop	PSA Graded Pop	PSA 9 avg	PSA 10 avg	Market Cap Rank	Market Cap	Release Year
JP unlimited	???	330	$3000	$7166	#152	$1,546,890	2004
JP 1st	???	306	$4160	$11969	#197	$1,229,080	2004
075/L-P	5000	328	$400	$1290	#962	$241,714	2010
145 BW-P	1000	113	$3225	$4550	#828	$270,975	2012

Looking at the table I would say limited mid-era promos share similar rarity to their gold star counterparts but sell for considerably less. The reason being that demand is less. Wild to see how much variance nostalgia can introduce.

i don’t think it’s too hard to understand which of these is the most sought after

rayquaza was one of the earliest polled pokemon in the e4’s favorite series. granted, the formatting was different, but regardless, the L-P barely cracked top 10 and the lottery SR alt placed lower than the regular BW5 set SR.

FINAL RESULTS - E4's Favorite Rayquaza

(admittedly, only with 69 voters…) reminder: everyone was allowed to pick up to 5 cards, but I imagine the order would remain roughly similar if everyone was only able to pick one. There were quite a few ties, so to make it easier on my sanity, I allocated one place per tie, resulting in a top 15 tied for 15th place 2 votes [34 xy arita] [50 sm shining] [56 amazing rare] tied for 14th place 4 votes [27 bw ur aa shiny] [45 hoopa] [48 shaymin] 13th place 6 votes …

to your original hot take - i agree, but i also think wotc is over priced (because i think it’s overrated). however, i can understand why many are willing to pay the premium to own those cards in certain conditions.