What's your current grail?

[pichufan]

@politoed666

@pichufan

I’m at the point in my collection where I have the 10 or 20 rarest publicly-distributed Pichu cards. There are 3 sample cards which aren’t included in that and at this point are probably the only cards I’d be really excited to have in my collection.

The more realistic of the three are the two Japanese cards which surfaced on Yahoo Japan Auctions in 2014:

The one on the left has the dotted e-Reader border and the one on the right has the striped border. These were both demoed at the Tokyo Game Boy Advance Product Announcement Meeting in March 2001.

I have never seen these before and had no idea they existed, but now I want them… But not badly enough to drop the inevitable five-figure price tag, should a copy ever surface. Any idea what they sold for in 2014?

The listing was for a lot of other sample e-Reader cards including those two Pichu cards: i.imgur.com/AQK3O80.jpeg is the full set of sample cards I believe (see the Pokémon TCG Picture Dump thread for more details).

Off the top of my head the listing sold for somewhere in the region of 110,000 JPY ($1k), which may not sound like all that much today but at the time the Pokémon Illustrator card was only around $8k and cards like University Magikarp and the Pikachu Victory Ring were under $50 - the TCG was in a very different place back then.

I take some comfort knowing that these cards do still exist and are out there somewhere.