I check daily for the decks im missing… for 4 years at this point. But its nice to see that im not the only one messaging from a trail of long stale breadcrumbs through more archaic messaging systems only to be told that they may or may not have what you want, that theyll look, and then you get ghosted.
Oh, I guess i started subreddits with side ideas of finding cool stuff posted through them. Its been more work than its worth… at least most of the time but then you get that really cool item showing up🤩
Travelled covertly (and internationally) during covid lockdowns to sell about $7k worth of cards, to then buy a $10k card in the same day (about 300miles away from the first stop).
I’m not NYPD or anything but wasn’t it illegal to fly during lockdowns?
I guess it varied from country to country, but we weren’t allowed to fly, had to cancel holidays etc. Hell we werent even allowed to attend funerals in person, only via livestream.
A few years back I was trying to get all the promos for Yuka Morii and was having insane difficulty locating the Chris Fulop 2004 World Champion Deck Oddish. I found the Bellosom without difficulty in NM, but for some reason the Oddish was a huge problem for me. Websites like TCGPlayer didn’t have any listings, and neither did eBay. Started scouring webpages on google with image search and finally came across a website for a store in Denmark that had one card in LP/MP.
Found an email for the store and reached out to them (not expecting them to respond honestly but I was desperate at that point), explaining it was for my illustrator collection and asking if they’d be willing to send it if I payed the extra shipping cost. To my surprise, they responded the next day saying they’d be happy to send it if I promised to show them the card in my binder page! It took 3 weeks and far more money for shipping than I’d like to admit, and was more MP than LP, but I was so happy to check it off my list! (1 month later I saw someone selling it on TCGPlayer for $1 in NM so now I have two )
My most recent purchase of the German Surf-Pikachu is probably my most desperate thing thus far…
Although I’ve been known to overspending on Pokémon cards for years, I’ve always made sure to not go below a certain threshold on my savings account. This threshold was of course a lot higher when I was still saving for a house than it is now that I’ve got a house and car, but after some other expensive purchases recently I was already below that threshold, and then this Surf-Pikachu happened to pop up (third copy I’ve seen in ten years time - and only first one available for sale). So for the first three weeks of September, I was literally out of money completely.. I’ve bought groceries and gas on credit, and even borrowed a few hundred bucks from my little brother for the monthly automatic expenses (electricity; insurances; etc.)
I did get my wages on the 24th and paid my little brother back, but safe to say, in October and November I will barely make any purchases. I do keep a list of all recent or upcoming releases for my collection goals however, so hopefully they won’t rise in price too rapidly for me to catch up.
But, some other things that come to mind in the ten years I’ve been collecting (I can likely name way more examples tbh):
Buying multiple booster boxes/deck in order to pull a single card (sometimes without luck, sometimes with extreme luck - e.g. I’ve bought a Korean CP6 box once just to get the Korean XY Evolutions Base Set Pikachu, but also got the Pikachu EX Secret Rare I planned on buying as single eventually )
Buying huge lots of 25-50 cards just because it contained a single new card for my collection - I did this all the time in 2016-2019.
Going through multiple pages of Google searches to find some French Detective Pikachu DVDs and Blu-Rays still in stock, only to get English, Italian, and German Pikachu when I opened them.. (More info here. TL;DR: The French and Italian DVDs/Blu-Rays had an error where the stamped SM190 Detective Pikachu promo language was at random. In the end, ironically enough, I bought an Italian Detective Pikachu promo from a French seller and a French Detective Pikachu promo from an Italian seller. )
Trying to buy a Christmas '99 Pack729 stamped Base Pikachu from someone on reddit - without any result in the end (and I still don’t have that card to this day ).. Although she was willing to sell it for the price I named (40 bucks iirc), it ended up being a frustrating mix of being ghosted for a couple of weeks/months before they responded again, as well as trying to buy something from a person without PayPal nor online baking experience whatsoever.. She mentioned she painted for a living and only dealt with cash in person.. How any form of online transaction is foreign to someone in 2020, despite being on reddit for some reason, was pretty surprising tbh. Anyway, in the end I got ghosted permanently, and although I did check again somewhere mid-2023, their reddit account was deleted at that point.. From the way she talked, I’m pretty sure she was a 40-60 year old woman who found her son’s/daughter’s cards, living somewhere in a very rural location.. Although that’s mostly just speculative based on my experience chatting with her.
In 2018 or so, three years after I started collecting Pikachu cards, an Italian HGSS Pokémon Day stamped Pikachu popped up for the first time, and I won the auction for 20 bucks. As usual, a week later another copy popped up, which was 12 USD bin. Since I already had one incoming, I ignored this second copy. Another five weeks later, it still hadn’t arrived, and after trying to message the seller a few times without a response, I ended up being too late to get a refund through eBay/PayPal.. Bye-bye ~28 USD (including shipping), and of course the 12 USD bin one was gone at that point. Halve a year later another one popped up for 15 USD bin, which I purchased. Three weeks later it still hadn’t arrived yet, and after a message to the seller, we agreed to wait another week. After that week, I got a refund. A few months later again, a fourth copy popped up. At this point, I told my friend to buy it for me and forward it, since this card was cursed for me. At the time he middlemanned another card for me, so the only extra costs were shipping from the seller to him. Let me say that I don’t believe in curses and it was primarily for fun and because it makes a great story , and luckily (as expected) this fourth copy did arrive at my friend’s place, and later through him in my collection.
In ~2017 I was making good progress on most languages for Pikachu/Seviper, but for Portuguese I only had ~15% of the cards. I’ve tried finding a middleman a few times through Portuguese/Brazilian Facebook groups, but without much luck. In the end I kinda gave up, although I did mention here and there I was looking for help. One of those places was in my collection video on YouTube. Someone from Brazil commented they could likely help me, and they certainly did! In two weeks time he was able to find all missing Seviper and all but one missing Pikachu for me (the Jungle 1st edition, which I later pulled by buying three sealed booster packs - coming back to no. 1 in this list again ). And he also helped me with all new Portuguese releases since.
I DMed random people on Reddit who had the card when I looked it up on Google Images. I also drove six hours to trade for it. The trade did not work out.
This is my current hell; trying to get the different serial numbers for the EX Series Yuka Morii cards (which, unfortunately for my wallet, include some of the Dittos). In an attempt to save some money I’ll take the gamble and buy the card in bulk on tcgplayer; sometimes turns out, most times doesn’t. I have encountered multiple times that I’ll buy the card shown in the picture on eBay and they send me one with a different serial number than the photo. They’re usually cool about reimbursing me when they don’t have it, but it’s still frustrating.
I’ve just given in at this point and buy a more expensive listing where I’m certain they have the right codes I need unless I don’t have any in which case I buy like 20 and gamble
Sending hundreds of unprotected dollars to random people from foreign countries I’ve never met on Facebook and IG in hope they would find some variants of cards I needed.
The most desperate thing I’ve done was overpay for a gold strip theme deck I was sure held an error no-damage Ninetales after missing the auction. I even tracked down the buyer on social media, only to discover it was a different versionafter the fact. By the time I finally checked and opened it, it was far too late to do anything about it. An expensive mistake that’s completely on me.
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).. Although she was willing to sell it for the price I named (40 bucks iirc), it ended up being a frustrating mix of being ghosted for a couple of weeks/months before they responded again, as well as trying to buy something from a person without PayPal nor online baking experience whatsoever.. She mentioned she painted for a living and only dealt with cash in person.. How any form of online transaction is foreign to someone in 2020, despite being on reddit for some reason, was pretty surprising tbh. Anyway, in the end I got ghosted permanently, and although I did check again somewhere mid-2023, their reddit account was deleted at that point.. From the way she talked, I’m pretty sure she was a 40-60 year old woman who found her son’s/daughter’s cards, living somewhere in a very rural location.. Although that’s mostly just speculative based on my experience chatting with her.
). And he also helped me with all new Portuguese releases since. 
Also a lot of the lock down fines etc have been repealed. Many countries have now deemed them unconstitutional.