Im 33 years old now, so I was right in the prime of my childhood when Pokemon was exploding in the late 90s. From what I remember, most of my collecting was in the base/jungle/fossil era, and part of that is that it was what my friends were collecting and trading.
Occasionally, id receive the Topps cards, usually as a gift from the uninformed. I distinctly remember getting a Charmander Topps Tin for Christmas one year. The cards always really drew me in, and I spent a lot of time looking at them, but were perceived as less valuable for not being “real” or styled less traditionally.
Like many, I phased out of the hobby as I got older. I’ve only recently come back into things.
What has been interesting to me, is that the strongest nostalgia cards aren’t the same ones that were my main chase cards as a kid - it’s actually the Topps cards.
The nostalgia wave first began for me when I saw that same Charmander tin from my childhood, sealed on EBay. It was one of those things that I hadn’t thought about in decades, but as soon as I saw it, it was like people pulled straight back into the living room floor of childhood Christmas, surrounded by wrapping paper and new cards. I hadn’t realized how deeply this was ingrained into the core of my memory, until I saw it again.
After I saw that, I started to do research on the set as a whole. What I came to find, is that I never even really knew what it was as a kid. I didn’t know that there were special packs, collector edition stamps, three different series, and especially all of the different foil types.
I quickly realized that Tekno and sparkle cards were out of my league, and started to focus on spectra. The first thing that really stuck out initially, was that pop data between Tekno sparkle and spectra was much tighter than the pull rates of: 1 in 15 for Tekno, 1 in 10 for sparkle, and 1 in 2 for spectra would suggest. For many cards there is 2-2.5x more spectra than Tekno/sparkle
As I was looking through listings, I was able to see other foil types that I never knew existed. What really shifted for me, was seeing Flareon in a rainbow print. I thought the card looked stunning. I started to look at other rainbow prints, and was amazed at how certain Pokemon looked in the foil. Jolteon/zapdos/electric really stood out, and so did the water Pokemon.
The aesthetic pull made me curious about rarity and population data. I was quite surprised by what I saw. With series 3 rainbows in particular.
The highest submitted Pokémon in that entire group of cards was Dragonite, with a total of 30 entries through PSA. What was maybe even more striking aside from general rarity, was that most of the cards had actually never had a single 10.
I started to crunch the numbers on the actual gem rates between the four (Tekno,sparkle,spectra,rainbow) and from a sample size of 10ish Pokemon in each set, Tekno had a 22 percent gem rate, sparkle 34%, spectra 24%, and rainbow all the way down around 3%
So my question for those of you that have followed Topps longer, why do you think the rainbow foil (series 3 in particular) lags so far behind Tekno and Sparkle?
My initial thought was perhaps it could be due to Tek,Spark,Spec being included in special packs, but then realized to get a rainbow print you had to buy a regular pack with a collectors edition stamp, so not sure if it can be chalked up to that alone.
Would love to hear perspectives from people that collected these closer to release
