What is a grail card you own and a grail you want to get?

[stagecoach]

My “Grail Story” is already documented here, but I will crosspost some highlights content: https://www.elitefourum.com/t/looking-for-a-corrected-kinebuchi-ivy-pikachu-promo-jp-corocoro-2-000-updated-with-story/

@stagecoach

A reprint that’s almost impossible for the layman to identify with a print run of only a couple thousand? How would I ever find this card? I meditated on this for months. Did I really want to start a collection I could never finish?

I’d never get this card.

@stagecoach

I had spent two years looking for it already on Japanese auction sites. I had never seen one. My hopes of finding one listed randomly or erroneously had been diminished and I knew it would be a miracle to get the card that way. The time had come to pony up and go public and submit to the terrifying ordeal of being known.

This thread yielded a couple of hints and leads here and there, but nothing that panned out. I upped the price by $500 every chance I got. But it was obvious the card was just not around to buy. This isn’t the sort of card people let go of.

I got this card by trading with another E4 member where all the stars aligned and we were able to both give each other exactly what we wanted.

@stagecoach

Thymeee and I are both extremely pleased and excited. We both have cards we didn’t know if we’d ever own. Before we talked to each other we had no idea how we’d ever get these cards. But now we both have them.

Trading with Thymeee was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in this hobby, and in an increasingly cynical and high-stakes culture of adult collectors it was absolutely magical to have an honest-to-goodness trade like we were still kids. Getting this promo this way feels just like it did when I was a boy. Someone else just had it, and we traded, and now I have the only one I’ve ever seen. What a dream.

Thank you so much for this card and this experience, Thymeee. I’ll never forget this!

As to what constitutes a my next grail…

I would love a University Magikarp someday. Highly, highly unlikely I can ever afford that one. I think I will eventually get all the cards on my current list but that’s the big cap stone that maybe, somehow someday, I might get. It would probably come 20 years from now after a period where I did not buy another Pokémon card for the preceding decade.