When I went to Japan at the end of 2016, I had planned to buy as many Mario Pikachu boxes as I could. I’m talking about like 30 or more. I ended up only buying 4 (2 for me and 2 for souvenirs). I was so tired from the trip and didn’t want to carry all those boxes from location to location even though I went to a Pokemon Center 5 of the 9 days there. Imagine seeing dozens of them just sitting on the table everyone lol. What’s even worse, is I collect pokemon but had sold my 2 boxes a year before the boom and the people I gave them as souvenirs to still have them and don’t really care too much about pokemon lol.
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Sold a red cheeks PSA 10 base 1st Pikachu for $5-$6k then the next day saw an auction in my usual searches. It was sitting at 1-1.5k range and had only 30 seconds left. I threw in a quick $2.5k bid to do a “reverse flip” of sorts and reacquire the sold inventory back at under half what I had just sold one for (a tactic I’ve successfully done several times).
Well lo and behold I won it for $2.4k! Great! Take a screenshot to send to my buddy @oldskoolpokemon and as the message sends I notice the damn electric mouse has yellow cheeks and I had been “duped”, (agreed?) 
. It wasn’t mis listed or anything and clear as day had yellow cheeks so being a man of honor I paid for my mistake and took the L. Had a few copies at the time I had acquired fairly cheap so I just auctioned that one to see how bad I ended up doing on it and lost a little over a grand on it.
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I have 2 that stand out, though I’m not sure I could have realistically done any differently.
I used to compete quite a lot and would often get booster boxes as prizes. We (competitors) used to struggle to flip boxes at $80 a piece in 2014-2017, often selling at prices even lower than that. I sold Evolving Skies at $75 a box and Legendary Treasures at $65 a box. Wish I’d been able to hoard those away but needed the $$ to travel to more events if I wanted to also pay tuition.
The 2nd one is a bit more realistic, I had tons of opportunities in the mid 2010s to buy special JPN boxes, mostly the Pikachu ones. The Ash’s Pikachu LV. X, the full art Pikachu with the silver border, the poncho boxes, even the Mario/Luigi ones. Could have gotten any of these at MSRP or 1.5x that, don’t even want to imagine what the profit margin would have been on those.
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I still have not acquired a Neo Shining Gyarados—which I consider a “must have” for my collection. No matter the going market price point, it always seems too high to me considering the pop report. (Demand, I know).
In fairness to me, I’m a first ed. snob, but a heavy holo bleed is really the pinnacle of this card to me, and holo bleeds are easier to find, and cheaper, in Unlimited. Paralysis by analysis problem for me with this card. If I don’t manage a trade at some point—which would be the ideal solution for me—I may never be able to buy it without feeling like I overpaid. Sucks that the market is rudely ignoring my dilemma and feelings on this…I feel pretty safe saying now this card will somehow end up being my biggest regret!
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Sometimes I regret not starting a Youtube channel to do competitive stuff.
I decided many years ago that I would not do it because, for the same reason I don’t partake in tournaments, it would simply take away too much time. Maintaining high competitive levels is one thing, I’ve done that in short stints before and it takes countless hours. Then you have to edit videos, coordinate battles across different time zones, by the time you get into things like organizing tournaments and team auctions you’re spending every minute of your spare time and then some on it.
And if you want to get into actually earning anything you have to play the current gen (even if the current gen is shit), you have to get into all the merch stuff, t-shirts and coffee mugs with catchphrases on them and all that jazz, competitive classes on patreon…by that time, it’s your full time career. Sometimes I feel like I should’ve have done something at least, even if going all-out is impossible.
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The obvious answer to this question is always I should have bought more earlier and shouldn’t have sold certain cards before they skyrocketed (non holo victory ring psa 10 for £115 I’m looking at you). Aside from those the other day I had a buyer scam me who then won another auction as I forgot to block them, I packaged the card up and then put it in a pile of cards I needed to mail out but then when I realised cancelled the order. Stupid me however forgot to take the card out the pile and ended up sending it them for free like an absolute idiot. Ended up costing me around £500 with both that and them scamming me.
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I’m sensing a theme of: Buy Pokémon Cards and never sell or get rid of them 
But seriously, great lessons to be learned here. Really enjoying reading everyone’s stories!
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On the other end, mine was a lesson of don’t buy lol. Got impatient and threw down for a crystal charizard at the peak of the hype in 2020 (???), right after getting back into the hobby after a few years of hiatus. So I had no idea what was going on with the market etc. At least it’s for my pc…
There are people that like Hypno?
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Situation for me quite similar to @jabby … the TL;DR life lesson of mine is to stay true to your gut feeling and what matters to you, regardless of how others might view it or fears about ‘what-ifs’.
2011, 19 y/o me at university with a bunch of time on my hands, getting back into Pokémon casually being in a position to pick up all the old grail cards I couldn’t get as a kid (crystals, shinings, gold stars etc), unaware that although small, a wider Pokémon collector community within my generation still existed. I knew that I had a deep connection to Pokémon that never truly left me since childhood. At the time I built a modest collection while also working out that I could actually make a small amount of money (£100 here, £50 there) by opening WOTC booster boxes and selling off the individual packs, weighing out heavies, selling singles etc. especially importing e-series booster boxes from the US for around £300 a box for Skyridge and Aquapolis, which even in 2011 were extremely difficult to find in the UK.
In total I probably made around £800-1000 across the course of that year which also factored in building parts of my 1st edition WOTC collection for what was effectively ‘free’. I was too stupid to realise that if I’d put more effort in and taken on more work to fund purchases, it could have become a much more lucrative practice. I was exploring the option of grading too, though the only thing stopping me from grading cards was the fact it could only be done in the US, and Ludkins didn’t exist at the time. I knew that these cards and products were getting more and more scarce, and even back then felt that they should be more valuable than they were (£50 mint crystal Ho-Ohs, £25 mint condition base Charizards etc), initially setting myself the aim of keeping everything for at least 10 years to see what the prices did.
I then lost my part-time job, and became worried about future finances, believing that it was irresponsible to be spending hundreds of ££’s on what was essentially children’s cardboard, and that the down-trend in interest in Pokemon TCG would continue as it had since around 2004. Basically, I FUD’ed the shit out of it all. I sold my entire collection and all the sealed products I had, in some cases taking a loss, purely out of financial fear. If I’d stuck with it, I’ve no doubt my collection would have expanded into more obscure cards, Japanese, trophies etc, and probably have a value within the 7-figure range now.
I’ve posted these in another thread before, but I’ve included screenshots of a few of my sales back in the day which I can still access on my eBay, they serve as a personal reminder to me of a few things - 1. Time is incredibly fleeting, 2. Don’t sell-out of your strongly-held personal values because of fear, and 3. If you have strong gut-feelings about something, whether that’s out of personal desire or its fundamentals, it’s worth taking a risk on. That said, I don’t regret anything, the positives that come out of these experiences and missed opportunities are life lessons which can be put to good use for future decision making.
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This isn’t the biggest but it’s one I’m not too mortified to share lol. Not getting fancy business suit art academy Pikachu when it was on the market in 2019. In summer 2020 there were still a few listings floating around. I bought one on eBay from a dropshipper that was quickly canceled with a crappy excuse and the remaining listings disappeared. It was a big mistake to interpret public listings as actual availability; they were probably a mix of the same copy & already sold copies someone didn’t check to de-list. I haven’t seen any for sale in the two years since.
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I’m surprised this hasn’t been said, but grading with CGC.
I didn’t grade anything too valuable myself with them but I wish I would have just kept them raw lol.
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Would have to say my biggest blunder financially was not selling more graded cards I had in-hand into the 2020 hype in anticipation of the price falling as everyone grades and being able to buy more back cheaper
Other failures
Stopping collecting for over 10 years because I thought the cards were a waste of money
Buying PSA 9 1st Edition Blaine’s Charizard for £2000
Selling my only 1st Edition Blastoise for £100 in early 2016
Buying Evolutions Charizard for £150 because they were selling for £200
Accidentally sending a lot of 10 slabs to the wrong ebayer (because I printed the wrong address label), luckily they sent them back
Selling HGSS packs for £8 in 2017/2018
Selling Generations packs before they went up like 500%
mines always been not buying more earlier, I dont regret anything I bought ever because I did a lot of research each time, but I did turn some good deals down in the past simply because my risk tolerance wasn’t where it needed to be
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I have a couple which I regret
First one was just not completing some of my wanted cards like the japanese crystal cards and some gold stars for my collction. before the crazy hype and increase I remember just browsing japanese sites and ebay often for deals as I always was holding off like yea its cheap now I’ll wait for some deals or bids that I felt comfortable with. I remember seeing japanese crystal cards for barely even hitting 100-200 marks.
The 2nd one is when the rocket briefcase was on preorder at the pokemon center japan website. My friend that was in japan allowed me to use her account for stuff I wanted or if there were drops she wanted but she couldnt get it as she was on her way to work. It was easy since I was able to use my credit card for purchases before they started blocking foreign cards in 2018. The preorder window was opened for a good 2-3 weeks and I said to myself about 120 for a briefcase with 2 cards, deck box and sleeves didnt seem worth it for me. The look was great looking and turned it down after it closed. They had a lottery for it in march to celebrate the anniversary of the online store so I was hoping to win one but in the end no dice. To this day seeing how much that thing has shot up in price made me regret not just ordering one for fun.
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I had just moved to a new apartment here in Japan which can get expensive with all the fees you have to pay so I was low on cash at the time. Walked into the Pokémon Center during the Mario Pikachu promotion, saw stacks of the Mario and Luigi card boxes, walked out the shop with a tin of Mario Pikachu cookies and the special hanafuda deck. Never did end up getting the cards lol Though the tin is really cool and I love the limited edition Nintendo hanafuda decks so I don’t have that many regrets, but I could be sitting on 5 boxes of each right now if I had the foresight back then.
I damaged multiple expensive cards by trying to get dirt stains off with my fingernail or jamming them into super tight sleeves, including crystal charizard and plasma storm charizard years back.
@thevenusaurgarden, that was an interesting story you shared along with all those sales you made. It’s too bad you had to part with a lot of things due to finances. I’m lucky now that I feel like everything I’ve acquired since I got out of school I should be able to keep as long as I want. Maybe I’ll want to part with something at some point, but the majority of big purchases I have made I feel are keepers. Overall I have definitely accepted the risk or stigma around Pokemon cards and collectibles in general, like any investment whatever happens will happen over the long term. Some things will work out while others might decline for a period. The main thing I’ve learned though is the people who have never sold and have just stuck it out have done overall very well on the majority of the cards out there, especially anything that is truly desirable or iconic.
I started doing this recently. I now have 3 Japanese graded cards. In the past few years especially there’s been some really nice cards and sets that come out of Japan and most of them aren’t massive in size so you can actually complete them or at least track down the most desirable ones a bit easier. Lots of very cool vintage offerings as well once you get looking around more and more. The other good thing is at least for now is the Japanese cards in general still seem mostly niche to any new/returning collector so you have to gain some more knowledge before exploring it further. The prices on a lot of them though definitely seem fairly cheap compared to English. Even with the language barrier, the artworks and rarity alone make a lot of them very interesting offerings to me.
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bought 1st ed ivy pikachu (jungle) in psa 8.5 for $2k… sold it several months later for $1.1k. you live and you learn XD
No blunders nailed it tbh
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