What card in your collection were you most reluctant to spend the money on or was overall the most difficult to acquire?

[Ratequaza]

There was no card where I was reluctant to spend the money on it, in case of doubt I just decide against buying a card. But regarding the most difficult to acquire card, Im gonna cite my collection thread:

@Ratequaza

And here finally comes the undoubtedly hardest artwork to complete. This is the Staraptor from Red Flash, released in Japanese in 2015. Now, the first edition version (like all cards I’ve not specifically commented on) was relatively easy to find. The unlimited one however is a whole different beast. By the XY era, the first edition print runs of Japanese sets were enough to satisfy almost all of the demand, so many Japanese XY era sets only received very small unlimited print runs, covering maybe 5-10% of the total supply. Like other species collectors before, I experienced the same thing: Initially you of course know that Japanese at that time still had first edition and unlimited, but since you didn’t have any trouble getting the other unlimited cards before, you don’t think much about it, until you arrive at one of the notorious sets and realize that you can neither find the unlimited card for sale anywhere, nor even find any pictures of it to begin with. For me, I first tried to get this card in April of 2023 and it took me until last week to finally hold it in my hands, so in total a little over 2.5 years. The journey to that point wasn’t easy, even if the purchase in the end was. First, I tried to just regularly post on the r/pkmntcgtrades subreddit, in the beginning without a concrete price tag, then later with increasing ones first offering $50 for the card in EX+ condition and later increasing the offer to $80 as well as offering a finder’s fee, while I similarly also started my WTB thread here. Both lead to encouragement from others, but unfortunately not to me finding the card. In the meantime, I also tried my luck with bulk purchases from Japanese stores stating that they don’t differentiate between first edition and unlimited cards, which lead to me now possesing 30+ copies of the first edition card, but without success.

I also tried my luck with opening the two unlimited Red Flash booster packs I found for sale / was notified about (curiously hoping for them to be light to have a better chance for the uncommon card I was looking for), but didn’t pull the Staraptor. I did pull a Staralili though and during my search for Staraptor also found two unlimited Staravias for sale, so I have the whole evolution line in unlimited now.

Anyway, besides those measures I also:

1. Had someone create a WTB listing on Magi (Japanese TCG marketplace) for me
2. Created a Trade listing on the Cardova marketplace once I learned about that
3. Created a request on Otsukai, both on the original site and after the relaunch
4. Asked vendors at two card shows if they had the card in their bulk
5. Manually searched the thousands of Japanese bulk cards of a newly opened TCG store in my city
6. Hung up a physical wanted poster there for a while offering 50€ for that card
7. Went to a card convention with a meme printed out and attached to my shirt including the same offer

None of these things ended up being successful though, so earlier this year, I turned to probably the most insane method yet and offered a XY8 unlimited secret rare Mewtwo for trade that I found while searching for Staraptor. I also posted it to my Instagram story and while some people were interested due to the offer being frankly pretty insane (not in the good way for me lmao), no one had the Staraptor card, so even that lead to nowhere. I later graded the card and sold it for around 300€, so that’s basically how much I was willing to give away in trade value at that point for what I initially thought was just another Japanese bulk card. However then, a little over two weeks ago, my habits finally paid off. I have only talked about the extraordinary measures I had taken so far, but there were of course also ordinary ones at that point baked into my daily routine (it still feels a bit weird to not search for Staraptor on Zenmarket after my daily 5 minutes of Duolingo haha). Every day, for basically since I posted my first WTB thread on Reddit in spring 2023, I searched all new listings under “XY8” on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions and after a while I also started to search around weekly for “ムクホーク XY8” and just “ムクホーク” (Staraptors Japanese name) to catch everything I might have missed that was not specifying the set. The latter is what ultimately lead to success: On Thursday, October 30, I was sitting in university, near the lecture hall, waiting for my class to start and hoped to maybe have a chat with another student who also tended to show up relatively early. She didn’t though in that case, so I figured that I may as well do my weeky ムクホーク-search to kill some time and there it was: A Mercari bulk listing of miscellaneous Staraptor cards priced at 300 Yen.

Now as you can see, only a first edition Staraptor is clearly visible in the main picture, however there was another one where the area of the symbol was covered. I had that a few times with other listings before and the card in the further pictures always turned out to be first edition too, but that time it was not.

I was more than amazed that I had finally found my grail card and probably pulled my debit card out of my wallet faster than ever before to quickly buy the card and then only had to wait until it safely arrived. So that was the story of how I got my Staraptor grail that I promised to tell in this post. It really shows the beauty of niche Japanese unlimited cards: You can offer three digit trade values for a bulk card and it still doesn’t work out, but when you do find the card, you pay less for it than for the shipping of most cards.