My little sister was telling me about her pokemon card collection and commented that the Charizard (sp?) gold edition, or something like that, is worth over $100! Yet she was unable to say why it is worth so much. Of course it is rare, but why? I think that she said that it is not even the best card in the game.
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- I don’know much about it at all, but I heard that there’s two “Char-” cards, a Charizard and a Charizomething-or-other. I’m still wondering why beanie babies were so high-priced.
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- Funny story, (if you know what I mean): There’s a promotion at local bookstores: buy something Pokemon and get a Mews card for an additional small price. A guy at work says that he wants one, because it’s the only ****** he’ll get his hands on that doesn’t smell.
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- MC
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. I’m just going to go on as if nothing had happened.” - Groucho Marx
The card is worth $100+ for the same reason Ming Dynasty vases are worth however much their worth - because that’s what people are willing to pay for them regardless of their actual ‘worth’ (as a piece of cardboard and a vase).
Pokémon cards are created to be collectable. This means that the makers will use several methods to make cards rarer than others, ensuring that folks will buy lots of packs to get a single card. For instance, the cards are already marked as being common, uncommon and rare. What’s more, some of the rare cards are “gold” cards or “foil” cards or whatever, making them even more rare. For play value, the card might not be all that, but if you intend on having a full collection of Pokémon cards, you have to track down all these rare cards and that means either buying 300 packs looking for Rare-iz-ard or whatever and winding up with 250 Common-iz-ards or else finding someone else with a spare Rare-iz-ard and shelling out the asking price for the card. In a sense, $100 is a bargin versus the cost per pack of cards and you chance of getting the card you want.
To make things even more rare, the cards themselves will be run as a limited edition, with only 100,000 or 15.5 million or whatever packs printed. This way, the makers get a quick sell out as all the collecters rush to the local Card Shop and buy 20 packs, either hoping to get that card they needed before all the cards are gone or else planning on selling the packs 6 months from now to the poor sap who just got into the game and can’t buy those packs anymore.
Whether or not you want to call this ethical is up to you. People who just want to play the game bemoan the fact that they can’t buy packs of cards because investors bought them all up. Investors bemoan the fact that the makers will reprint cards to allow the players to have them, thus driving down the value of the cards. Wizards of the Coast, producers of Pokémon also make a game called Magic: the Gathering which was all the rage a few years ago. The same occured, with the older cards being worth up to $500 depending on its condition and even cards that were under larger printings being worth over $75. Finally, WotC decided to run the “limited edition” sets not by print count, but to print them on demand up to a certain date. Investors had no reason to buy the massive quantities that they did (and the set itself was nothing to get too excited about) and the whole M:tG fad began to collapse upon itself. Then WotC started to reprint older cards so newer players could buy them without having to spend $150 for used cards, and the entire speculation market went from fading to ruin. Magic: the Gathering still exists, but it’s pretty much bought by players now, not investors and the news it got by rushes to buy that one special card through purchasing a case at a time is long gone.
Still, the makers do call it a collectable game. Hummel figurines, US Mint proof sets, sheets of Bugs Bunny stamps and replicas of the Titanic by the Franklin Mint are all sold with the intent that people will buy them as investments. Granted, they’re not marketing themselves to 12 year old kids spending mom and dad’s money, but everyone has their own opinion.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
I can’t understand how many times I hear "this Charizard is the rarest of the Pokemon cards, when in fact it is no more rare than any of the other foil cards from the Pokemon Base Set. It is the most sought after american card because… well, everyone wants it. Charizard is a fad within a fad. Despite not being a very good card in the game, kids like him because he has high hit points and a powerful attack.
Many children who haven’t yet learned to read play Pokemon cards in a fashion more similar to the card game “war” than Magic: The Gathering. They each choose a card, or a stack of cards, flip one over and the card with the better stats (Hit points or attack) wins. Charizard is the biggest of the big, with the hightst hip points and the strongest attack, easily crushing any pokemon facing him in this simplified game.
In the Wizards of the Coast sanctioned version of the rules Charizard’s power is balanced by a high energy cost to use his attack and the need to evolve using two other cards. But the card’s got cool art.
Wizards of the Coast does plan to start reprinting the first few sets of cards in February so collectors should be aware of the situation described by Jophiel in the above post: more cards entering the market, driving supply up and cost down. I’m also anticipating many of the younger kids to “grow out” of pokemon, which should drive demand down and cost down. Bad for collectors, good for players (assuming they can find someone to play with).
I don’t believe Pokemon cards are a good investment. The reason old baseball cards and old comic books (I mean old… Golden age) is that folks didn’t believe they were valuable. Covers got folded back on comic books. Baseball card collections got thrown away. Barbie dolls got haircuts. And kids grew up. Thirty years later, folks wanted the things they remembered from their youth. And there wasn’t much left in good shape, which is why Action Comics #1, Babe Ruth cards and 1960’s Barbies are so valuable today. But kids today are looking at these cards as investments, putting them in sleeves, in binders, in safety deposit boxes. Thirty years from now, when today’s youngsters start getting nostalgic, there’s going to be plenty of Pokemon cards around in good shape. Better investments would be something kids actually play with: the Pokemon toys and games and going back a little further, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphing Power Ranger toys. I doubt we’re going to see too many of those guys MOC (mint on card) because every kid ripped 'em open and started playing with them.
But Pokemon are so damn cute!
Nekosoft: self proclaimed Pokemon Master of the SDMB. Battle me for the Cecil Badge!
Thanks Nekosoft, you cleared that up and then some!
We must blame them and cause a fuss before somebody thinks of blaming us.
Sheila Broflofski
Hey, I gotta balance all the MPSIMS threads I post to with insiteful, thought-provoking posts in other forums. And I am the self-proclaimed Pokemon Master of the SDMB, so I consider it my duty.
Now when will I find someone to battle…
We were sure lucky to find a balloon to rent way out here,
I’m hoping that’s not the impression I gave. I’ve no idea how rare Charizard is, having never played the game nor looked into it. I am aware that there are rare cards and then there are rare foil cards which are the same as the rares… just… erm… foiled.
So, I was guessing that if 1 in 20 is a rare, then 1 in those 20 rares is a rare foil (the numbers might not be right, but you get the idea).
Since Foil Charizard is statistically the same as Plain Charizard (i.e. same hit points and attack) then I’m guessing that the only reason to want a foil is to either just 'cause it’s niftier looking, to complete a set, or to store in your hermetically sealed, xeon filled vault and wait until the great Pokémon rush of 2055.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
try ebay.com to find out what any pokemon is worth. Try the pokemon newsgroup to download pictures of the cards to print from your computer on card stock so you can wave in front of the kids faces and say Nyah!
Something else you need to understand to know why that particular Charizard card is so expensive: there isn’t just one kind of Charizard, and some of them are much rarer than others. Also, they’re released in Japan (in Japanese) sooner than they’re released in the United States. Sometimes the US version is different in some way other than just the language, and sometimes the different versions of the cards (even if they’re both in the same language) have different amounts of strength or different kinds/strengths of attack.
If I recall correctly, the particular Charizard card that’s so expensive a) is Japanese and b) is of a variety that’s rare even there.
An attempt was made to preserve the “collectibleness” of Magic cards by printing the initial print run with black borders, while reprints of that card in later editions have white borders. I don’t know how well this worked, though.
Jophiel, your first post was accurate. I was refering to local ten year olds claiming the increased rarity of Charizard, not you. But I’ll pick some nits in your second post, in the intrest of clarity.
First up, there’s no non-foil american Charizard. All the foil cards in the base set have no non-foil equivalent (a pain for us players who don’t want to play with a $20 card). Later expansions (Fossil and Jungle) do include non-foil versions of rare cards, but not base set. Obviously, if you’ve not played the game you couldn’t know this, so no big deal. The odds in base set for getting a foil card are one in three packs. There’s 16 foil cards in the base Pokemon set so if my probabilities don’t fail me, roughly one in 48 packs of base set Pokemon should contain the elusive fire dragon.
To go off on a different tangent, there is another layer of rarity of Pokemon cards known as the First Edition, just a normal card with a little first edition logo on the side. These cards were released first and there’s a fixed number of them. A first edition american Charizard is worth easily twice as much as a normal one.
Currently the most valuable Pokemon card is Happy Birthday Pikachu: an unplayable japanese card that (1) is foil-y (2) is rare and (3) has Pikachu on it. Bids on Ebay hover in the six hundred dollar range. I’m still looking for one, but I’d rather get a used car than a piece of cardboard.
Dojo. Casino. It’s all in the mind.
Thanks for all the input everyone, and to handy, great idea, I’m doing that to my sister!
We must blame them and cause a fuss before somebody thinks of blaming us.
Sheila Broflofski
One word of warning for anyone collecting anything. It is a lesson learned early and hard. Your stuff is not worth a book or website claims it is, it is only worth WHAT SOMEONE ELSE IS WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. For example I have a comic book that is valued by reliable sources as $250. Yet when I needed money and went to sell it, I found most collectors already had it, and those who did not offered me only from $100 to $150. Buyer beware. Nuff said.
“Solos Dios basta” . . . but a little pizza won’t hurt.
An attempt was made to preserve the “collectibleness” of Magic cards by printing the initial print run with black borders, while reprints of that card in later editions have white borders. I don’t know how well this worked, though.
Worked about as well as the Le Car, from what I remember before getting out of the game (somewhere after Chronicles and the first Ice Age set when they were starting to reprint black bordered cards as white bordered). Most of the reason the cards were worth anything was because they were out of print, so not many people had them to play with. Once the cards were re-printed in white border format (and the reprint series cards were printed in numbers far far greater than the originals) you had no reason to pay the used market price for a black border unless you wanted to get one of every single card from every edition. Ok, some people were like that and I’m sure anyone who was into the M:tG craze when it was big knew a guy or two with a 300 page binder filled with Alphas, Betas, Aravian Nights… etc. Most people though just wanted to buy the cards to play with them.
As an example, back before Chronicles (the first reprint series), a Fallen Angel card from the out of print series Legends was running for about $15 or $20. After all, if you wanted a Fallen Angel in your deck or collection, there was a fairly small number of them about. The day after Chronicles was released (actually, the card list got leaked before the release date) the price of a Fallen Angel, which was going to be re-printed dropped to maybe $7.50. By the time it really hit home, a Legends Fallen Angel was $5 and a Chronicles white bordered one was under a buck.
Wizards of the Coast tried to appease the collectors by sayng not every black bordered card would be reprinted, but virtually all the sought after cards were. Those that weren’t were either poorly balanced to the weak end, or else restricted in use. A search of eBay now shows that a Legends Fallen Angel ran for $2.40. The heavy, rare, and un-reprinted power cards (Moxen and Lotus) still fetch $300-$400, but that’s what they were getting 5 years ago and I’m assuming there’s less Moxen and Loti now than there were 5 years ago. In other words, they’re no longer appreciating in value.
Well! I guess I went off on a ramble there. The lesson is, don’t buy gaming cards in order to pay your tuition.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
Amen to Jophiel and Gabriel! It’s all about supply and demand and to a lesser extent: “the Benjamins”.
On a related note: I got my Pokemon Neo Binder set in the mail today. Before Christmas it was selling for about $40 on eBay. After Christmas I picked mine up for about $20. Right now they’re going for about ten bucks. Every kid that wants one probably has one. Caveat Emptor. (Mine, of course, isn’t an investment, as I don’t plan to sell it. Obessive-compulsive and Pokemon don’t mix. Gotta catch 'em all can be taken literally.)
Dojo. Casino.