Hi there!
Sorry if this is a stupid question. I’ve tried searching the forums, Google and Bulbapedia and found no good answers.
Because I am trying to collect all goldstars including their different variations, I recently stumbled upon the “World Championships Decks” or WCDs for short.
My first question: How were these products distributed (especially the 2006-2008 versions)?
Could you just order them online? Or even walk into your local Walmart and find them sitting on the shelves?
Which brings me to my second question: The PSA populations for the WCD gold stars are extremely low. Is this because these products were really limited, or are there actually a lot of them out there but nobody cares enough to get them graded?
Are you specifically talking about the 3 eeveelutions from the 07 World Champions Pack? If so, they were sold in Japan online only for 2 weeks from June 15th to July 1st 2007. This extremely short window makes the pop low on the 1st ed packs, and miniscule on the unlimited packs
This is about the english versions of World Championship Decks. Im not 100% sure about the older versions but from what ive seen about newer versions and what ive found around shops, they were same as any modern WCD. Youd find them at retailers. They may not have been at walmarts and targets since they are a bit more specialized but card shops definitely could get them.
As far as grading, since WC cards arent tournament legal, have a different back, were mass printed, and have a printed signature of the deck user on them, the values are low and there wasnt a reason to grade them. Some people, like yourself, collect all variations but overall until recently, they were mostly considered junk and not worthy of collecting. Even now that is still pretty much the case and people dont usually count them as official pkmntcg cards (because they technically arent, similar to the trading figure cards) so there hasnt been a value to grading them outside of preservation.
No, I am aware of these but the WCDs are something different and only printed in English I think!
You can see a full list here. Some decks from 2006, 2007, and 2008 contain non-holo versions of gold stars (jolteon, latias and mew if I am not overlooking something).
I found someone opening up all the decks from 2008 here.
Thank you for your detailed answer!
The prices of these have been exploding these past few months (like many other cards), so I am not sure if I should just wait a bit until the prices come down again