What is your favorite Pokémon memory?

General
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While I’m not a boomer like some of the people here, one of my favorite pokemon memory definitely has to be going to my first TCG pre-release, which was for Evolutions. I never grew up with base set or any WOTC era stuff, so I’m not particularly attached to the set, but what made it special was that it was the first pre-release AND first event I went to. A friend and I agreed to meet up at the event, we played the card game in class often since we finished our work rather quickly, and we both were excited for the set. It was a big thing for us since it cost $30 and took about 4 hours playing all of out games and I remember just having complete fun and meeting many new people. I even got the zard promo. Too bad that zard is gone lol

Another one of my favorite memories has to be when my aunt went on a visit to Mexico and she brought back a few packs of Forbidden Light. This was before she was diagnosed with stage 4 liver/colon cancer. We opened them together and hit a Greninja GX, got that sucker graded at CGC earlier this year and it hit an 8. I planned on getting her to sign it but it returned too late, she had gotten too weak to sign the slab but I was able to show it to her and she was enthusiastic about the grade. She thought it was the coolest card she’d ever seen, and she thought Greninja was pretty cool too. Probably one of my more treasured collection pieces for sure.

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22

My fondest memories of Pokemon revolve around the toy store I opened in Tokyo in the 1990s.

Highlights were the days we would receive delivery of CoroCoro with promo inserts; the spillover games of Pokemon being played on the floor of the store because all of the tables were already occupied; the vending machines filled with Pokemon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh capsule toys; and the weekend event we held featuring Ron Foster, the WOTC employee responsible for translating all of the Japanese Pokemon cards into English.

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@japanime, That looks like so much fun.

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It was a magical time.

Some of the kids (now in their 30s and 40s!) still remember my wife and I, and will approach us to re-introduce themselves and say hello when we’re out and about.

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25

Oh man, I love threads like this!

I have a few.

  1. I remember when Red/Blue first came out, I got Blue and my sister got Red, she lost interest really fast so I played Blue and got every Pokemon you could in Blue. I then played through her Red and transferred all the exclusive Pokemon to my Blue, got traded a Mew from a friend and had a full 151 Pokedex.

  2. A kid at school would offer to take home kids Pokemon games and level up their Pokemon over night. As a kid, we all thought he was grinding away, when in fact, later on, the rare candy cheat came to light and we figured out he got a head start on all of us.

  3. I loved the TV show as a kid and when Togepi was introduced I loved Togepi. I asked my mom if I could get a Togepi card. My mom called all over and found a sports card store that for some unknown reason had Japanese Southern Island Togepi that she bought me for my birthday. It was and stil is my favorite card to this date. Note the Avatar. It has a nice big crease going across Togepi’s body from constantly taking it out of a top loader as a kid.

I feel a lot of these stories get lost in the sauce when discussing Pokemon because the first thing people mention is the value of the cards. Glad to see so many stories of memories.

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Nice thread!
There are sooo many memories, here are some of the top of my head :blush:

I remember being gravitated towards all the people on school playing pokemon red/blue, just watching them play all the time, wishing I would own a copy myself one day… Although I actually wanted pokemon red for Charizard you can’t imagine the joy I had finally getting my own copy of pokemon blue!!

I was also very fond of the anime (The giant Dragonite episode still gets me!) and the first movie, featuring Mew & Mewtwo!
My dad told me a few weeks before it released in the theaters that we would go and see it… Couldn’t help being excited weeks before, during and weeks after the movie!
Everytime I look back at my first movie Pikachu and Mewtwo promo’s I still zone out to that memory :blush:

For one of my tcg memories we go back to the time the neo sets released, damn I was so in love with that neo genesis Lugia, wich unfortunatly I never owned when I was younger… About a year back I finally pulled the trigger to buy it in a PSA 8 1st edition! Till this day it’s one of my prized possessions!

One of my most recent memories is pulling the big bad kanto trio in celebrations.
Although they aren’t the real Base set or Shadowless or 1st edition or whatever, they’re still the old school arts and I love that I finally got the chance to pull them myself without breaking the bank.

So grateful my parents gave me the chance to enjoy pokemon to the fullest when I was young as it’s been such a big part of my life!
Looking forward to reading everyone’s memories here :blush:

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27

Don’t honestly know where to start. Definitely a big one for me was when I would stay with my father every weekend. He would always buy me and my little sister some packs after grocery shopping for the weekend. I had so many good memories opening those packs. This was during EX era, but I remember seeing packs from Base set on up still on store shelves in some places.

My little sister always got the good pulls haha! She got a 1st edition revelation foil Suicune, which we still have in excellent condition, Base set Blastoise, and Venusaur as well! The best I pulled was a Dark Ampharos which is still one of my favorite cards to this day. This was still during the time where we thought that the 1/— was the rarest card in the each respective set. So that made the Ampharos even more special to me. Another strong memory was a reverse holo stamped Banette from Crystal Guardians. The set code was 1/100, so naturally I thought I got the rarest card. Iirc, I traded it for some pretty darn good stuff.

Nearly completing my pokedex on Pokemon Fire red. I have 383/386 caught. Still missing Umbreon, Deoxys, and Mew. A bit of this nostalgia was dredged up recently when I finally found a way to get Deoxys! I found a code online that someone managed to dig up from an official release of deoxys. All I have to do is buy a couple wireless adapters and a GB cartridge that can accept super tiny SD cards, and I can obtain a legal copy of Deoxys on the game. I remember getting to 201 on my Ruby and Sapphire and expecting Birch to give me something special and he just gave me a certificate… I was not very happy, but it is still a strong and surprisingly good memory to this day. I guess it was fun to complain about.

Last bit is just the constant wheeling and dealing for trades. Making deals and offering the contingency of tradebacks to keep things cool between friends. Not sure if it’s a good skill or not, but at the time, I would quite often trade a ton of non-holo cards for one single holo card that was clearly much rarer than the sum of the parts I was offering. But I love the arbitrary values we would associate to certain cards: the 1/—being rare, Legendary or not, holo style, what Pokemon in general. We had our own rating systems and it made sense to us, I’m sure everyone had their own system when trading. I definitely wouldn’t go back to the system but the nostalgia thinking back is wonderful.

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Playing “Blue” under the Bedcover with a tall Lamp which was so bright i couldnt move or Parents would have realized i prefer Pokemon over Sleep

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This tread is awesome!

For me it was trading Pokémon cards with my siblings. It was me, two of my sisters and my brother. We would sort our cards by type and set them in piles in front of us. We would sit in a circle and go through each pile (even though we mostly knew what everyone had). I remember trading for all the Pikachus early and never trading any back. My little sister wanted one so bad I gave it to her for a birthday present. It was the most excited I had ever seen her! Made me so happy to make her that happy!

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You should share more of these, they are magic!

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I remember looking at Tangela, Machop, Staryu and most base set commons and just staring at them wondering what they are and why do they have that pose, what are they doing there and what are they thinking. My favorite memory is those small fragments when I am encountering the first 150 for the first time, mostly through the illustrations of base set.

On occasion the feeling returns to me, with some extra thought and effort.

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Scott, when you were searching for the other two Southern Island cards you needed to complete your set, you should have hit me up. I had a few (thousand) to spare.

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@japanime, Wow. That picture hurts so good! I’d love to own one of those cases. Only seen a few pop up over the years.

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@japanime what a wholesome experience that must have been.

I remember sometimes I had to spend the day at my mum’s work and I would go on the computer and print pages upon pages of anything I could find Pokemon related. Booklets of gameboy hints/tricks and mysteries like Mew under the truck. I remember being told off once because I must have printed one of those hundred page walkthroughs haha.

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I don’t really have one favorite memory in particular, but here some things that stood out and I still remember (and some I’ve shared before):

My first Pokémon experience was when me and my little brother were just zapping on TV for a cartoon to watch, when we saw a boy throw a red-and-white ball to a caterpillar (the end of episode 2). Intrigued, we continued watching the next episode after that and really enjoyed it, even though we didn’t fully understand it yet at that point.
A few days/weeks later, our parents bought us our first booster packs (English unlimited Base Set). I can’t remember the non-holos anymore, but my little brother pulled a holo Alakazam and I pulled a holo Chansey. A few days later at school I traded my Chansey for a Pidgey, Pidgeotto, and Vulpix. As a 7 y.o. kid I didn’t care too much about holo cards, I just wanted more cards, so a three for one trade was a done deal. Later that week we’ve heard about the Pokémon craze/hype on the 8 o’clock news and they said some cards were selling for even 100 Gulden (old Dutch currency)! They showed a Charizard of course, and… you guessed it: Chansey. Looking back they probably meant a 1st edition Shadowless version, but as a kid I had no idea those different versions existed, and I doubt the news reporter did either.
My next two booster packs were English unlimited edition Jungle packs, from which I pulled a holo Jolteon and holo Snorlax. The Jolteon I still have to this day (in heavy played condition obviously), but the Snorlax I traded away for a Mewtwo WB promo (which wasn’t a bad trade at the time, but would be for sure these days).

We also always received 1-4 packs each in presents during Sint Nicholas (Dutch holiday that’s pretty similar to Christmas). My parents usually let us open all the packs, put them on a stack, and let us choose one card at a time. That way it was more fair than when we would have opened the packs and one of us would get lucky and the other not. Although overall, me and my little brother had a pretty similar luck with pulls now that I think back. Both our first Base Set packs contained a holo; all four of our Jungle packs contained a holo; with our Neo Revelations packs we had both the Shining Magikarp (mine) and Shining Gyarados (my little brother’s); with Aquapolis we had a Crystal Kingdra (mine) and Crystal Nidoking (my little brother’s). The only difference, and I’ve always been pretty jealous, was that my little brother had a Neo Destiny Shining Steelix and I had none. I always wanted that triple-star rarity, which I thought was so cool at the time. (I do have it now, since my little brother stopped collecting long ago and gave me his collection two years ago.)

One other memory was seeing the second Pokémon movie in cinemas, which might even have been the first time we went to cinemas in general. Since our parents were with us, we received four promo cards, which were all four the Moltres. I remember thinking what a badass and amazing artwork it was, and it’s still my favorite TCG artwork to this day (see my dedicated collection to it in my signature). Since we got four of the same card, we traded before the movie started with some other kids, so I had a Moltres and Zapdos, and my little brother a Moltres and Articuno. (A few years later I traded my Zapdos for his Fossil Articuno, so he had the WotC promo Legendary Birds trio and I had the Fossil Legendary Birds trio.)

And one much more recent memory was adding the Japanese unlimited edition WCP Seviper to my collection. It felt amazing to 100% complete a TCG collection of my favorite Pokémon, which I had been working on for almost 4 years. :blush: (For anyone unaware why Japanese unlimited edition World Champions Pack non-holo Rares are so rare and hard to find, see this reddit comment of mine.)

Greetz,
Quuador

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