i shit you not the card directly behind the tapu bulu ir was another holo tapu bulu. at least i’m full up it i ever wanna build a deck with them 
and yeah, we’ve always been interested in playing the game and i don’t think it would really be worth the money to just try and collect the cards without playing. i’m not really interested in competitive play or the meta rn, we’ve just been smashing together whatever we can with the cards we get and trying to have some fun.
I have min/max brain and definitely overly concern myself with competitive viability, even for gimmick decks, they need to be “good” gimmicks lol.
I might actually try this for fun and and theory craft with the cards I’ve accumulated so far.
yeah, i think it would be fun to do a deck centered around SF Kingdra ex and Haxorous for some sort of discard shenanigans but honestly it’s hard to think of a way to do this that isn’t just less efficient and clunky than just going for stuff that let you just normally draw and place cards. i’d be curious to have your thoughts since you probably know more about this stuff than me :p
Yeah I think you’re right, it might just be a bit more clunky with Haxorus. From shrouded fable Earthen Vessel is definitely has synergy with Kingdra. If you wanted to stick with the discard theme origin form Palkia Vstar and radiant Greninja are good for getting things into and out of your discard. Then Baxcalibur and Irida are really good for just playing as much water energy as you’d like. Palkia, Greninja and Bax are all also water so Kingdra’s king’s order becomes more valuable.
(for reference Kingdra EX was/is pretty popular and I like Kingdra and have looked into decks so that’s why I somewhat have an answer for you heh)
ah cool, gotcha ! ty :3
ok nevermind on “not buying cards for the foreseeable future”. shit’s kinda rough so partner and i were in desperate need of some retail therapy and went out to buy some cards.
i wanted the Iron Valiant ex box but gamestop was completely cleared out, so we went to target to see what they had.
ended up getting the “meddling sparks premium collection” box, since it was 12 boosters for $50. it was interesting. came with holo scizor+scizor ex, holo luxray + luxray ex (partner to luxrays, i took scizors), and two oversized luxray ex cards. the packs themselves were 7 base set scar/vi, 3 obsidian flames, a paldea evolved, and a pokemon go pack. i was hoping for like Twilight Masquerade or something and was kinda disappointed. it definitely seems like just something to get all of the old unsold stock off of warehouses and onto shelves.
honestly despite my disappointment, there were a lot of good cards though. partner and i each got 6 packs, they got two illustration rares (sprigatito and dollive. they ended up trading the dollive to me for a few of my cards they wanted more since they don’t care about that pokemon) and a melmetal ex. i pulled an obsidian flames revavroom ex, plus a melmetal v. and then there were a nice selection of holo/rev-holo and common cards.
was definitely interesting. good if you want base set plus some obsidian flames and other assorted stuff i guess. not bad but not something i’ll go for again i think. side note: i think we actually got an accidental box with 2 oversized cards? because it looks like it’s only supposed to have one. lucky we got the secret double box for two people ;p
i’m not particularly in love with the oversized card though, i guess it’s just a kind of neat bonus. luxray isn’t a pokemon we have much investment in and it’s just kind of weird? like it’s very pretty but it’s super floppy and my main thought about it is “how do i store or transport this without it just getting completely destroyed”.
If you have a large hardcover textbook you could throw it in there, in-between parchment paper to prevent ink bleed. I’ve been keeping an eye out for price drops on the Paldean Fates Skeledirge set and also don’t know wtf to do with the giant card.
I’ve generally been thinking about how I want to store or display my collection. As primarily a collector a lot of my enjoyment is staring at the objects and having feelings. I’m thinking it could be fun to put some things in a frame, maybe a couple graded cards and the jumbo Skeledirge card. Then I can stare at them on the wall and call it “wall time” or say I’m having “wall enrichment”.
“wall time” is very good…
edit: also ty for the advice, it turns out it does fit perfectly within our copy of absolution!
Interesting video, they’re an artist collector and tcg player. Because of them I learned that the Terastal/Prismatic Galceon SAR is illustrated by the mangaka of Witch Hat Atelier!?! cool.
It looks like there’ll be a mega evolutions set coming later this year! The old megas are fine, some better than others, but I’m interested to see what they do in this era of fully illustrated rares. Megas, Team Rocket, B/W and the return of owner’s Pokemon cards all coming this year probably means the tcg fever isn’t dying anytime soon.
Speaking of owner’s pokemon, the “Journey Together” set went on preorder today and sold out in <1hr with most people having crashes or being blocked from refreshing too often…No worries, scalpers are selling preorders on ebay for ~2-300USD(for an etb!)…I’m begging Creatures inc. to just saturate the market, at least for a little, and print way more but I know that’s unlikely. “MSRP” no longer exists for new product unless you’re importing foreign language, beat bots and everyone else to purchase from the pokemon centre or you manage to randomly find them in a big chain store. Old sets trending similarly. I’m just going to abstain from purchasing the overpriced items, focus more on specific singles for my collection.
Crown Zenith is so cool:
we went to aldi today and they had blisters so we bought a couple. got some good cards! got our first gold card too which is cool!!
and now, without further ado…
there will be so many images so i will be making good use of the hide details dropdowns for this. i’m sorry auldnoir server storage
first we have all of the big ~special~ cards as well as others that our childhood selves organized into the “favorites” tin.
next, so though our collection is almost entirely B/W and X/Y we found a not insignificant (at least 35 cards) portion that were older? they’ve always kind of perplexed us.
like i said, we really didn’t know what to think of these as we were younger. we hadn’t really seen anything like them before, and absolutely had not heard of what the hell a Delta Species was. i have to assume we got these off of one of those “lot of X number of random pokemon cards!” things online. as a kid we were really paranoid about counterfeit cards for some reason? so we were always suspicious of these like the others we uh. destroyed trying to “test” them by bending them. we fucking cringe thinking about it lol.
but yeah, as far as we can tell these seem to be legit. surprised they’re in such good condition honestly.
i think they range from around 2003 to 2011? most of them seem to be from D/P/P and HG/SS sets, but obviously the older ones aren’t.
and now… the kind of main event…
so first things first: yeah turns out we were wrong. none of these are actually 1st edition. whoops.
it’s a mix of first and second gen though, with a pretty good split between english and japanese cards. like we’ve said we got this binder from someone else, so we don’t really know the story behind any of the collection sadly.
next up are the Dark cards. this is another set of cards that we just did not know what to make of as a child, and thus always fascinated us.
that definitely wasn’t all of the Dark cards, but it was most of them, and the ones that were of most note.
ok yay that’s it really. cards extravaganza.
Gratz on the gold! I’ve yet to get one, and thanks for sharing these! It’s fun to see. I had a few of the old ones when I was a kid with no idea on how I got them because other than the R/B starter set I never opened a pack until Plasma Storm in 2013.
The Kids WB Pikachu is such a little bug! What a mouse.
I get that ppl want them because they’re rare and special so people want to collect a rare special thing but it’s hard to get the hype behind cards stamped with the set logo. like man it’s just ugly and takes away from the aesthetic appeal imo. but aesthetic appeal is our main qualifier for cards we like/want and ik not every collector is like that
Yeah, I feel like they’re meant for die hard collectors who do master sets or get every version of a Pokemon’s card but they end up feeling like speculation bait for investors in addition to being garish. It doesn’t help that they’re often promos and for whatever reason their promo qc is trash.
I’m okay with the pokemon center stamps, they’re at least a bit less obstructive being at the bottom.
agreed on the PC point. i didn’t realize they had quality control issues with promos. is it just bad print quality or smth or just any manner of “card came bad/fucked up”?
Both!
Often they just have them in a plastic wrapper so they’re subject to all kinds of damage. Edge wear, whitening, denting and scratches are pretty common. Like in an etb they’re just free to move around in the box or in the case of distributed promos those are also just a ton of cards in plastic wrappers in a cardboard box that the distributor gets.
Also a wide range of printing errors. I got a Crown Zenith etb and the Lucario promo had texture warping all over the surface wherever flames show up. Like a glue gun that’s too hot and the glue is stringy and runny. Not uncommon from what I understand.
Oh also, as an aside, if you have a card that you care about the condition of do not put them in etb sleeves. They’re known to wear down cards. Penny sleeve + toploader is the way.
oh shit thank you we didn’t know that! we have been doing that, whenever we have some money we’ll grab some of those
New SR for Journey Together/Battle Partners dropped:
They killed Hop?
TBH I’m generally not a fan of pokemon SRs of this type that are just the pokemon, big, with no background. So, adding Hop’s ghost does improve it slightly for me.
it looks like they’re doing that with all of the Trainer’s ex fullarts its really funny i can’t believe Lillie is fucking dead
also man i’m glad we didn’t get FOMO’d by prismatic evos (not like we would have even been able to get anything). been watching pack openings and ppl are kinda getting jack shit LOL. still do wanna get our hands on some of it at some point because it does seem like it has a lot of good cards mechanics-wise, but it’s kinda whatever. when we’re able to start collecting again we really do just wanna focus on Paradox Rift and TWM. plus singles of the cards from Shrouded Fable we couldn’t get
