Greetings fellow NFT Collectors!
I am here to tell you a little story about how my wife and I decided to get into Pokémon Cards. First off I want to stress that our intent is to PLAY THE GAME as the Pokémon Trading Card Game is actually a lot of fun to play. Honestly, if it wasn't then Splinterlands wouldn't exist since Pokémon is what put trading card games on the map. You can claim it's Magic cards all you want. You're allowed to be wrong. Anyhoo, I digress.
So, unbeknownst to me, my wife was a long-time fan of the Pokémon TCG, but was disallowed to collect the cards in her youth by her mother, claiming it to be frivolous stuff she doesn't need. I was always into trading cards myself and it was a housefire in grade 9 that killed my collector spirit, but I wanted to get back into collecting physical cards after I played a bit of Splinterlands. I didn't like Splinterlands. Digital collection is not my cup of tea, nor is their style of gameplay, and I kind of wanted to try physical card collection again. Then, about 3 months ago I noticed that my wife was watching a lot of this PokeRev youtuber who does a LOT of Pokémon card pack openings. One thing leads to another and I end up watching the Pokémon cards being opened along side her.
It didn't take many live-streams for us to discover that there was a new Trading Card expansion coming to Pokemon, the Brilliant Stars set. Our youtuber did a live stream where he opened several booster boxes and he noted that the pull-rates of high rarity cards seemed to be more "consumer friendly" than last generations. Something like an average of 13 'hits' per box instead of the usual 7-10 hits. This swayed us to start our collection with two booster boxes from the wordy "Pokémon Trading Card Game Sun & Moon Brilliant Stars Expansion Set"
Double Your Value With Pokémon TCG
Now, if you haven't opened booster packs from Pokémon in a while then you may not know that each booster pack comes with an online code that you redeem in a digital counterpart to the analog game. Pokémon Trading Card Game Online is a popular full feature application for Windows/Mac/Android/iPhone devices. It comes with battling, trading cards, selling cards for in-game currency, and a full set of missions and quests for you to explore the extremely vast world of Pokémon TCG.
A booster box contains 1 PTCGO code card and 11 Pokémon TCG cards. If I remember correctly the layout is as follows;
- 1 basic Energy card (or in rare cases a V-Star place card instead of an energy)
- 6 common type Pokémon cards (denoted by a small black circle beside the card number)
- 3 uncommon cards (black diamond symbol)
- 1 rare card (black star symbol)
On top of these you have a reverse holo card in most boxes (the stats block is holographic instead of the character art) and a chance at some Ultra/Hyper/Secret/Rainbow rare cards as well! To learn more about the different rarities of Pokémon cards I recommend going to this website.
For the Brilliant Stars set there actually is a set within the set to collect known as "Training Ground" cards. They go beyond the 172 base cards and add a "TG" number count that goes to 30. Flareon is TG01/30, Vaporeon is TG02/30. You'd think Jolteon would be TG03/30, but you'd be wrong. They're actually TG04/30 with some other random Pokémon taking that 3rd slot. WTF!
Game-ify the Game!
We were hesitant that opening Pokémon cards would be a speedy endeavour that passed quickly, so we decided to make a game based on opening the Pokémon packs. We made a points system to go along with the rarities of the cards and then tallied up the points total at the end. My wife beat me, with her box containing slightly more "V cards." Her final score was 205 to my 189. But, when we went through current eBay card values for ungraded cards I ended up pulling 2 of the top 3 most expensive cards. With one being a $57 Charizard. Our overall ROI was roughly 2/3rds if that's your jam.
If you are opening Pokémon packs with a loved one I highly recommend making rules for a game to play while you do it. We ended up spending over 4 hours just opening 72 booster packs. You can even do simple games like "Guess the energy type." And if you're bold, maybe bet your booster buddy a pack on the outcome.
Overall, this was a very fun experience and a wicked trip down nostalgia avenue. I'm sure most of us older folk have some memories of Pokémon cards on the school playground in their youth. The card game itself is still fun and now we got the disposable income to make a dent in catching them all!
I used to play MTG in my teen years, so I can totally relate to the addictiveness, and from my understanding Pokemon is very similar in strategy and gameplay. Lots of podcasts I listen to have had guests on occasionally mentioning profits from Pokemon cards, very mainstream, so I can imagine the upward trend will continue.
If we were to get some of our best cards graded we would see our $300 worth of booster box increase in value to around $5-600. And that includes the $100 per card grading fee! The value is definitely there!
As a kid I did transition to Magic cards in High School. Which coincidentally timed with the housefire that ruined my room. (Fire in my mom's sewing room spread to my room directly above it.) I don't really remember what I had for Magic cards, but I do remember that I had a holographic
energymana card which was my pride and joy because it was a "Pity Prize" from getting last place in a local tourney! 🤣That Flareon card is beautiful