You need that rare card, maybe it’s in a harder language to find. How much shame do you have to get it?
My example:
I needed the Espeon and Umbreon holo from Korean set Mystical 7. I couldn’t find any copies for over a year. I messaged a YouTuber from a video 7 years prior asking if he still had those cards from his pulls from a booster box opening video. No response.
For those same cards, I messaged every Pokémon ebay seller who was based in South Korea, and actually found 2 people who had the cards I needed. Most people politely responded to my random request.
Not very desperate. But a few years ago I really wanted a set of pokemon Bandai cards from this one ebay seller. However, the seller was Greek and would only ship within the European Union. So I was kindof randomly reaching out to collectors on instagram that seemed to be from Europe. Then on discord. Finally, a guy that I sold to before (I think ?) was willing to buy them and send them to me from England. The Greek eBay seller however forgot to send all the cards in the set so, I had to pay for two packages from England to the US.
I opened absurdly expensive booster boxes (EX to B&W era) to find common cards I needed that could get a PSA 10. Some positive results, lucky unexpected pulls but definitively not a good “investment”
I’ve spent maybe $150 at this point gambling on Indonesian randomized decks to pull a Torchic. I haven’t gotten one and I may have bought most of them that are easily findable in the country at this time lmao
I also recently found French Torchic promo 6 and I paid for a friend to travel to France to pick it up in person since the seller was not willing to ship the card.
I had to adapt to Ben’s (aka Pokémon syndicates) vocabulary to acquire no raritans for a decent doran amount. After some timington my grammar finally sufficed.
Searched all over until I found a single picture of it on google images.
Followed that picture to an 11 year old blog post on a website I never heard of.
Scrolled through the comments until I found someone selling the same one.
Made an account and reached out to the commenter (who hadn’t posted there in years).
After a few days with no response I emailed them at the address they linked to their page.
I didn’t get a response there either so I searched for their username and found them on reddit.
I was finally able to get in contact with them, they still had it after 11 years, and I bought it off them.
Made my first real international purchase and paid almost twice what they charged for the item for shipping.
It wasn’t actually all that expensive, especially in comparison to some of the cards and other random stuff in my collection, but it is definitely the most convoluted buying experience I’ve had so far.
Worth it though, the story is fun and this guy is one of my favorite things I own. It’s just so silly.
Me personally though, I gave away my lunch for 2 weeks to one kid when I was seven or eight to get a card (I can’t even remember the card I just remember that the kid wanted the food and had a ton of cards that he was trading for random things)
Naturally, being a lower pop card, there was no available listings on eBay. I was able to get in contact with 4 owners.
I found a post by a reddit user on the ptcg trading subreddit from 2 years ago, went through their post history to find their university in Canada, looked through their class’ ig’s following list to see if their first name matched, and found their personal ig to contact.
I found another post by a reddit user from the UK, looked up his username and found his abandoned ig account, looked through mentioned posts and stories until I found his new account.
Went through old ebay listings and contacted the sellers to see if they could get me in contact with the buyer.
Put 100$ finders fee and spammed every ptcg discord/reddit page about my bounty.
@RabidSquirtle I did this in middle school too. My memory of my youth isn’t that good, but I think I gave away my Lunchables lunch to the Magic the Gathering dude at our school for like a month to be able to pick some cards out of his binder for free.
Thanks for pinging me! I must have had that image of the sushi saved in my clipboard from a discussion on discord and not properly copied the picture of the card…
Contacting people on Youtube ~10 years ago and asking would they be interested selling graded 1st ed. Neo Genesis holos, decent amount of sales happened via email and later some of them even joined E4 once it was mentioned while chatting about other stuff.
I haven’t been particularly desperate to find certain cards, but I have required a religious search strategy. Ironically, it seems that these cards tend to pop up most when I am not actively wasting hours searching for them.
