What is the rarest/hardest language in the world to collect?

General
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21

Italian also?

I know Mirmex in Italy recently acquired the Pop 1 PSA 10 1st Ed Zard.

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22

Can comfirm it is a mountain lol, atill cant see the top

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23

Tbh i personally find korean less rare than some euro languages, not saying it isnt rare but i have far more rare korean cards than any other language

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To add to that last thing also korean has the most language differences by far so that is another factor of me having alot more aswell its a tough one but i say for european portuguese and spanish can be very scarce

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At the end of the day, if you don’t have connections or know how to use middle man services, most non English non Japanese languages are scarce for Westerners.

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26

If you don’t happen to live in Europe that is. With Cardmarket at least German, French, Italian and Spanish should usually be fairly easy.

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27

@thsigma is right imho: Japanese is the hardest. Also kinda proven by the fact I currently am missing ten Pikachu cards among the fifteen available languages, of which 5 are Japanese; 1 is English; 2 are German; 2 are Spanish; and 0 in every other language. I know my Pikachu collection goal is just a single sample, so doesn’t say much, but still.

Also, you later clarified your question to this:

But then the answer would still be Japanese imo.

Why not Polish or Russian as you mentioned? Because from the entire Base Set though the SV era, there are just two Polish sets and ten Russian sets, each except for one with additional Reverse Holo variants to collect; so four Polish and nineteen Russian ‘sets’.
Yet for Japanese, there are 174 sets, with roughly 75 of them having both a 1st and unlimited edition variant, and roughly 10 of them having additional Reverse Holo variants, totaling to over 250 ‘sets’ to collect. Not to mention, some of those unlimited edition sets, especially the WCP; L2/L3 (which also have Reverse Holos!); certain XY sets; etc. are all among the hardest sets to collect in general across all fifteen available TCG languages, and yes, even harder than those Polish/Russian sets..

Also, hardest language to collect also depends a lot on where you’re located. I know a lot of American collectors who struggle with finding Dutch cards, but since I am Dutch, I don’t have much trouble finding a lot of them at all (except for the Dutch unlimited edition Fossil cards, which are almost non-existent - another one of those sets that’s harder to find than any Russian/Polish cards).
Someone who lives in Russia can probably find their respective cards a lot easier than let’s say certain Italian cards. Yet the reverse is true for someone living in Italy. It all depends on where you live on how easy/hard it is to find certain cards. :person_shrugging:

I had A LOT of trouble finding Portuguese cards, since they’re almost exclusively released in Brazil. But when I finally found a Brazilian middleman, he helped me go from ~10% to 99% completion, by finding all Portuguese Pikachu cards I was missing within two weeks, except for one (the Portuguese 1st edition Jungle Pikachu). So for me Portuguese cards were one of the hardest language to get at the time, yet for him it was the easiest, since he could just buy them from domestic webshops.

Greetz,
Quuador

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The confusion in this thread can be settled this way. What is the rarest/hardest language to collect?

  • floor difficulty is going to be a language like Russian or Polish.

  • ceiling difficulty is Japanese.

In other words, the most common Russian cards are way harder to find than the average Japanese set card but the rarest Japanese cards are way rarer than the rarest Russian cards. Both answers are right, just depends on how you interpret the question.

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