What is the draw to gray stamps?

Hey guys just curious as to what the draw to a gray stamp 1st edition card is? Are they more valuable or is it just another variation/error to out into your set?

The average Joe doesn’t care about them, they’re much rarer than the standard stamps, and will often bring a premium when correctly listed, but generally aren’t quick sellers

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For me:

It’s one of those things that I love base set & original WOTC Pokemon cards. It’s the ā€œGotta catch em allā€ mentality. Rather than collected duplicates over & over it’s another variation of the same set. Most people could care less, but for me it’s another layer to the collection.

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Ok I gotcha, reason I ask is I was at Dave and Adams the other day looking for sun and moon singles for my binder, the clerk and I got to talking and turned out he had some psa cards that they had just gotten in so he went to go look couldn’t find them then called his manager to see where they were so after about 30 minutes he finally finds them and when I go through them I didn’t find much of interest to me most were actually pretty bad grades there was a couple of psa 2 cards in there lol but because he went so far out of his way to find them for me I ended up taking a psa 8 1st edition shadowless nidoran for 5 bucks

ā€œ@gemmintpokemonā€ Very well said!!

As for me I consider them part of the 1st edition base in general, for economic reasons I close my eyes to the color gradient in the stamp as I do for the thick and thin variants.

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Ya know I’m glad you replied because after getting home and thinking about it that afternoon I remembered watching your base set booster box opening you did not long going ago and remember hearing you rather pleased finding a couple of gray stamps. Yet another reason why I asked my question, with your reaction I figured there had to be a monetary or collectible ā€œrewardā€ behind them.

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Lol you answered my next question for me ! I was gonna say so you can basically say the same thing for the thick and thin stamps! Thanks for The input!

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It’s one of those variants that requires a certain type of buyer. You have to be pretty invested and knowledgeable about the hobby to really want these.

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Most has already been said:

  • The beginning collector doesn’t even know different versions exists regarding grey vs black; thick vs thin; Ā©1999 vs Ā©1999-2000.
  • The average collector does know about these differences, but couldn’t care less. Or for financial reasons chooses to not care.
  • The high-end collectors (or those that go to the real nitty-picky - like me :grin: ) think these differences are awesome, and a great part of why I like collecting so much. Every now and then we come across a new variant we didn’t knew about before - even though some of these cards were released over 15 year ago. Cards like the Ā©1999/Ā©1999-2000 differences for the Spanish cards; the Ā©1999-2000 Australian Fossil cards; the Glossy-Back Australian Jungle cards; the Thin stamps; etc. etc. I personally love to learn about all these differences, and even more so to add them all to my collections.

Greetz,
Quuador

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I’ve always loved errors and have a pretty nice baseball error collection so it was natural I’d pay attention to variances with these cards. The grey stamps fit the mold for me. They’re very rare, rising in value, hard to find in mint condition, and not a ton of collectors look for them which makes it possible to accumulate.

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Thanks for the input guys! I really appreciate it!

My perspective is that I collect ā€˜thin stamps’ over 'thick. A grey stamp means nothing to me and I’d probably choose a thin stamp over a grey if both were PSA 10 and the same price. That said, the point it does become cool to me, is if I, or anyone were to make a complete grey stamp set. It’s the rare collection of the rare collectable and that makes it a fun objective to me, but my collection would have to be pretty complete before I got around to that one.

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Grey stamp is getting into crazy pedantic people territory.

It’s just ink which was running low on the printer… that’s the obsession and reality of what it is.

But ey, money to be made, something different, something ā€˜rare’, it’s obscure, it’s an error… it’s more money in the bank, so people will collect and cash in on it.

I personally am not adding it to my complete base set collection yet. Maybe down the line… who knows.

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Better get them now before they dry up like the ink in the stamp lol.

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Keep selling it mate. You know how to drive a product up :wink:

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Last year I was offering minimum of $250USD for any condition grey stamp Gyarados, I managed to locate the PSA 9 copy my offer was $1100AUD which was around 30% over PSA 10 prices at the time, but it was already gone at that point the buyer paid around $900AUD. I have since abandoned actively looking lol.

As for why, it is the only card I need to complete my English Gyarados collection

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I’m not selling mine though. I have 4 or 5 listed but my collection consists of over 500 lol.

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