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INTEREST: Pokémon 1st Edition Booster Box Sells for $56,000

Sheesh! You can get a Japanese box of the same set for a fraction of that price. Why are US card collectables so expensive?

No one knows the exact number of 1st Edition cards, but it's been estimated that less 10,000 of each card was produced.

"Most people never saw the 1st Edition cards because they sold out almost overnight," said Perdue.

Pratte points out that many 1st Edition cards have condition issues straight out of the packs. He says scratching on the surfaces of the holographic cards can be a problem, as can chipping on the blue borders on the backs.

"With Pokémon cards, you don't have to worry about the sharp corners because they're all rounded," said Pratte. "They are blue-backed though, so you do see a lot of cards where there's terrible whitening or chipping [on the edges]."

Sheesh! You can get a Japanese box of the same set for a fraction of that price. Why are US card collectables so expensive?

Looks like the main reason is that the Japanese base set never had a "1st edition," and they weren't all that popular in the US when those 1sts came out, so they're particularly rare: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/1st_Edition_(TCG)

kotomikun wrote:

Looks like the main reason is that the Japanese base set never had a "1st edition," and they weren't all that popular in the US when those 1sts came out, so they're particularly rare: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/1st_Edition_(TCG)

Card games in Japanese general don't do the whole "1st edition" thing. American versions of Japanese card games also tend to have a bad habit of artificially inflating rarity for cards. Yu-Gi-Oh is especially notorious for this, where cards that were Common or Rare in Japan are bumped up to Ultra Rare, or tournament event-only. Cards you could buy in a 1000 yen starter deck in Japan cost hundreds of dollars to buy singles if you wanted the American version.

I looked around and you can buy a Japanese edition of the Basic set of the Pocket Monsters TCG for $3750 Buy-It Now on eBay. I imagine you could find it for a lot less if you looked on Japanese sites since eBay tends to be a terrible marketplace for Japanese imports and attracts a lot of price gougers. Still a bit of money, but nowhere near $56,000

-Stuart Smith