Look For Rare Pokemon Cards
Some cards could be worth more than others because they have unique features like holofoil or a special symbol. Other cards may not have many copies.
Heres how to identify rare Pokemon cards.
Rarity Symbols
To determine how common or uncommon a card is, you can look for rarity symbols.
Most Pokemon cards have one of three rarity symbols:
- Diamonds: Semi-rare
- Circles: Common
Cards with a star icon on the back are the rarest and can be worth the most money. You will want to pay closer attention to these rare cards and look for additional special features that add value.
Holofoil
If you collected Pokemon cards as a kid, you likely got excited when a pack of cards contained a holofoil card. They just looked cooler than all the other cards.
Now theres another reason to be excited about holofoil cards. These cards are more valuable than a standard card thats ink-only. The entire Pokemon image may be holographic or only the reverse side.
Rare Letters
Certain card series have rare letters stamped on the front.
Some examples include these stamped letters:
These letter stampings can be for recent releases with the United States version of the Sun & Moon set launching in 2016.
Secret Numbers
Some cards may have a secret number that is higher than the actual number. For example, you might have card number 123 of 100 printed cards.
It can be worth your time to have a professional card grader verify the authenticity and condition of rare cards.
Most Valuable Pokemon Card Sets
Organize Cards By Set:
One of the best ways to sell your Pokemon cards is by organizing them by set. This makes it easy for buyers to find the cards theyre looking for and also allows you to get a better price for your cards.
You can organize your cards by set using a simple index card system. Just label each index card with the name of a set and list the cards on that card. This makes it easy to keep track of your inventory and makes it easy for buyers to find the cards theyre looking for.
If youre not sure which sets are popular, you can check out online forums or ask your local comic shop for advice.
First Edition Cards Are King
Pokémon cards that were released before Nintendo began distributing the trading card game were printed in two sets: first edition and unlimited. You can tell that a card is first edition because of the Edition 1 badge located at the bottom-left of the card illustration.
It is these cards that carry great value, while their non-first edition cards are much less valuable. For instance, an unlimited holographic Charizard from the Base Set perhaps the single most famous Pokémon card in existence sells for about $215 on average. However, a quick look at eBay reveals that first edition Charizards can easily sell for thousands of dollars.
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I give you another advice: when evalutating your Pokemon collection do not use CardMarket.it since the price of the suff is strictly related to what they have on stock. However, it remains a very good site to buy sealed things . On next episode well see what are the common ways to increase the value of your collection. If you miss the Part 1: How to evalutate your Pokemon cards, click here!
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Reasons Not To Invest In Pokemon Cards
Theres a potential upside to investing in Pokemon cards, but as with all unique investments, the cons deserve to be heard:
- Pokemania may end soon. As with any investment, hype, and influencer marketing drive up the price of investments. So, prices may quickly deflate.
- Appraisal is difficult and expensive.If you plan to invest in a card worth $5,000+ one day in the future, youll have to pay PSA $300 just to reappraise it and if the markets hot enough to sell it, theres a chance the company will become overwhelmed again and suspend services, jeopardizing your timing.
- Cards could get lost, stolen, or damaged.Pokemon cards only hold their value if they remain in 100% pristine condition. If a PSA 10 Charizard drops to PSA 9 while its in your possession, it loses 80% of its value.
- Demand for rare collectibles is extremely fickle. Sure, demand for rare Pokemon cards may be high right now, but it could easily disappear overnight as young investors and collectors turn to something else. The same thing happened with Beanie Babies, some of which sold for $10,000 in the late 90s and are worth less than $10 now.
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Selling Your Pokmon Cards
Now for the fun part: selling the cards and making money. Many of the strategies for selling Pokémon cards parallel the tricks for buying.
Search Engine Optimization
Suppose you learn the basics of each online marketplaces SEO guidelines. Use the right keywords, post a great thumbnail, and promote your listings in other ways. This way, your cards will get in front of more potential buyers.
High-quality Photos
As we already noted, high-quality photos encourage people to purchase a particular card. So its a no-brainer that youd take a wide variety of great images of each card.
Posting high-quality photos on your listing can increase the cards value because it ensures that your buyers trust you.
Sell Cards on Multiple Platforms
To sell more cards in a shorter period, it helps if you at least try posting your listings on a few different platforms. Find the right balance for you adding too many can be overwhelming.
You can even cross-post the same card on multiple sites and keep track of which help you bring in the highest profit.
Be Wary of Buyer Scams
Buyers scam sellers just as much as sellers can scam buyers. On top of that, platforms like Mercari take the buyers side in a dispute more often than not.
Rayquaza Gold Star Holo Ex Deoxys
- Release Date: 2005
- Grading: PSA Gem Mint 10
- Pokemon card value at auction: $45,100
An early favorite of Ruby & Sapphire, Rayquaza has seen an uptick in popularity over the last decade. So it makes sense then that its cards would also start to climb up in value over time. In 2005, The Pokemon Company released the Ex Deoxys TCG expansion featuring the Flying / Dragon-type.
As a gimmick to get Pokemon card collectors interested in the set, the Japanese company introduced Gold Star Pokemon cards into the hobby. As mentioned earlier, the incredibly rare Pokemon cards featured a special symbol next to the name of the mon. Of course, the king of these marked collectibles is the Hoenn Legendary itself.
In December 2020, a perfectly graded Gold Star Rayquaza sold at auction for $45,100. Given the Legendarys continued popularity in the franchise, and just how little of the gold Pokemon cards were actually produced, we expect this item to increase in value as time goes on.
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How To Spot Rare Pokemon Cards
In this section, Im going to focus on cards printed from 1996 to 2000 for two reasons. Not only are the rarest cards from this era the most valuable, but theyre also the trickiest to identify.
So whether youre looking to sell your old collection or simply invest in the right cards, lets cover Rare Pokemon Cards 101.
The Base Set of Pokemon cards, or the OG cards from 1996 to 1999 that we all know and love, actually came in three flavors: 1st Edition, Shadowless, and Unlimited.
Pokemon Card Set Symbols
Use this handy guide to look up Pokemon card set symbols, set names, and set years.
The most common way to organize Pokemon cards is by set. To identify the set, look for a little symbol at the bottom of the card, next to the card number. There are a bunch of these set symbols 5-6 sets are released every year, each with a different set symbol, and theyve been printing cards since 1999!
The following table is a complete list of Pokemon card sets, sorted by date the newest sets are at the top the oldest are at the bottom. If I missed something, let me know if the comments! I want this to be THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE FOR POKEMON CARD SETS!
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Whether The Pokemon Card Has Been Professionally Graded
You dont need to have your Pokemon cards professionally graded in order to sell them. Often, its not worth the cost of getting them graded, unless you have an extremely rare card in perfect condition.
However, if a card is graded by a company called PSA and gets a good score, it may be worth a lot more than if the card wasnt graded.
The amount a PSA grade will improve the value of the card depends mostly on the score. If PSA gave the card a 9 or a 10, then this can increase the value by 3-4x or even more, depending on the rarity of the card.
On the other hand, if they only gave the card a 6, 7, or 8, then it might be worth only a bit more than an ungraded card.
If a card is PSA graded, it will be encased in plastic with a red PSA sticker at the top specifying the grade.
Where To Sell Pokemon Card Bulk
If youre an enthusiast or collector of any kind, odds are you can spot expensive singles or rare cards amongst a stack of low-value items. And while separating those single cards out and selling them one by one is most often how youll make top dollar, getting rid of all your common bulk Pokemon, trainer, and energy cards all at once for any modest payout is a win.
Fortunately, there are places that offer fairly generous rates for the low-priced cards youre no longer interested in. Here are the best places to sell Pokemon card bulk.
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How To Value Your Pokmon Cards
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If you want to sell your Pokémon cards, its important that you value them first so you know youre getting a good deal. Fortunately, Pokémon cards are easy to value once you know what to look for and where to look.
Thoughts On Pokemon Card Set Symbols
Good info. This helped me narrow down that a misprint card I have is fake. But it worries me that all my cards have always come from booster packs. So a lot of my cards could be fake. Damn shady comic book stores.
If the cards came from real booster packs then the cards should be genuine unless it was a fake pack of Pokemon cards Ive never seen that before. Ive just seen reprints of high dollar cards sold online . All the cards Ive collected have come from booster packs I dont buy individual cards because Im not that serious about collecting/playing specific cards. I make due with what I get from the packs.
Matthew Its hard for me to say without seeing the symbol. Cards from 1999 can be valuable especially if its a Pikachu Trainer No. 1, 2, or 3 these were given out at the winners of the Pokemon World Championships they fetch 10s of thousands of dollars! But those cards have a Poke Ball symbol and that doesnt sound like the media symbol you describe. It could be a Snap Pikachu Trainer card, that set has a camera symbol, its in Japanese so not sure if thats it. The Snap cards are from 1999 release of the Snap 64 Nintendo game. Players could take snapshots in the game and compete to get their snapshot printed on real Pokemon card with credit to the player that snapped it. Id have to see a picture of the card to tell you more.
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Psa 10 Base Set Holo Shadowless Charizard: $420000
There are a lot of factors that make this card worth so much compared to any other Charizard card. Specifically, the lack of a shadow means it isn’t just a first edition, it’s the first print run of the first edition. While most base set cards have a shadow on the right side of the art frame, the very first cards Wizards of the Coast printed lacked it, giving them an extra level of value.
Second, though shadowless Base Set Charizards are fairly common and number in the thousands, a PSA 10-graded one are incredibly rare. Only 56 have ever been identified by PSA.
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These Charizard cards have become one of the prime reasons for the Pokemon Card trend of the past two years, with YouTuber Logan Paul opening one as recently as February 2021 that was estimated by auction site owner Ken Goldin to sell for upwards of $500,000. In auction it tends to sell for significantly less, though: last year one sold for $264,000 through Heritage Auctions. In March 2022, Charizard broke its own record, and sold in a PWCC auction for a new high of $420,000.
What Is Our Pokemon Card Values Chart
Our pokemon card value finder is the largest TCG lookup database that is updated on an hourly basis. Our online price guide tool helps users easily search and instantly find the price of any Pokemon cards. You can search by individual card, by Pokemon name, or browse our Pokemon card set list available for all TCG sets.
People of all ages love Pokemon! We know first hand, as we are major poke-fans ourselves. We grew up collecting Pokemon cards and playing the original games on the gameboy when they first came out. Heck, we remember trading our holographic Charizard card for a copy of Pokemon red for the original gameboy. We love Pokemon and the TCG so much that we dedicated our time to creating this website for other people who love it as much as we do.
Beginning your search is simple. You just type the name of the Pokemon you want to lookup, the Pokemon TCG set name, or the name of the rare Pokemon cards you want to see list information on. We will return you the results that we have in our database and you can easily jump to the next Pokemon, card, and set in line. We believe that browsing cards and finding prices should be simple and easy to do.
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World Championship Master’s Key
A copy of the Master’s Key card sold for more than $25,000 in August of 2020. Unlike most cards sold at auction, this one wasn’t graded by the PSA and was instead appraised by Beckett. Whether or not a copy still sealed in the original trophy case would have fetched more remains to be seen, though, given the card’s value, it’s perhaps a little surprising that the seller opted to open it up.
The Master’s Key was originally handed out to contestants at the 2010 Pokemon World Championships. The event took place in Hawaii and was contested by just 36 players. As a result, the card is incredibly rare, with only nine GEM-MT 10 copies – the highest grade that can be handed out by the PSA – in existence.
Gold Star Umbreon Play Promo
Released in Japan in 2005, the Gold Star Umbreon Pokemon Play promo features some truly stunning artwork. This, combined with the card’s rarity, led to a copy being sold for $78,000 in December of 2021. The card in question beat the previous record holder by a cool $8,000 thanks to its coveted PSA GEM-MT 10 rating.
In order to get their hands on a copy of the card at the time of its release, collectors would need to be a member of the Pokemon Player’s Club and then accumulate 70,000 EXP points before the end of the fourth season. Considering players only received 100 points for attending official events, not too many of these were ever handed out as evidenced by there being just 24 graded by the PSA to date.
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Brilliant Stars A Newer Box With Charizard
Brilliant Stars was released on . One problem with this set might be that there arent that many powerful cards, as you might expect from some of the newer sets. However, if theres a card that can save a mediocre edition, thats certainly Charizard!
Theres two different Charizard cards here, and thats without counting the different art versions of a card. You can open both Charizard V and Charizard VSTAR in a Brilliant Stars booster box. You can see both of them below, in the iconic cards section. Youll notice that theres also Arceus VSTAR and Galarian Moltres, so therere certainly still some good cards besides Charizards.
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Identifying Valuable Pokmon Cards
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