The final starter Pokémon!
Over the next couple of days I’m going to share photos of my Pokémon card collection, along with some stories about any interesting cards I have.
With a few exceptions, almost all of these cards are over 20 years old. Well, technically they’re all over 20 years old, but I mean most of them have been with me that whole time. I collected all 151 between elementary school and junior high school at the height of the Pokémon craze, but somewhere between the end of junior high and the start of college, about 10 or so cards were stolen.
I replaced those cards later, but they feel like cheater cards to me now. What I mean is- I didn’t collect them as a kid, pulling them out of packs or trading them with friends. I went online years later when I had a “real” job and bought them specifically to finish off the collection. I’ll point those cards out as we go along.
Something important I’d like to note is this: I am not a “value” collector. Never have been. Pokémon came out when I was about 6 years old and I jumped on the hype train immediately. My prime collecting age was around 8-12 years old. I collected the cards because 1) I loved the show, 2) I loved the games, and 3) everyone else on the planet was collecting and trading them!
What I mean to say is, these are 20 year old cards that were played with, traded, moved between binders and old shoeboxes, and shown to anyone who would look at them. We didn’t use “sleeves” or “card protectors” when we were little. If the card wasn’t slotted in an old binder page borrowed from the back of your dad’s baseball card collection, it was just sitting out in the open like the first time you pulled it out of a pack.
Heck, if you had a stack of Pokémon cards sitting around, or you were bringing your deck of cards over to Bobby's house to have a Pokémon battle, there was like a 95% chance the cards were held together by a dirty rubber band.
That will probably give most “serious” collectors heart palpitations, but hey- that’s just how it was.
While most of my cards are still in decent condition, you won’t see anything that will fetch more than a few bucks. You gotta remember, these are the cards of a kid from 2 decades ago, and they look like it.
I never even heard of “grading” cards until just a few weeks ago, and I’m not particularly interested in that anyway. I never saw my Pokémon cards as investments. I have boring index funds for that. These cards are a fun reminder of my childhood. I like to pull out my binder and look through the cool artwork from time to time.
It’s also fun to see the looks of amazement when I show the cards to my friends. Most of them got rid of their collections over a decade ago, either because they moved, lost them, or just decided to get rid of them. I’m sure more than a few of them had the heart-wrenching experience of learning that a parent threw them in the garbage at some point as well. My own parents laugh and joke about how much money they spent on them, but they think it’s cool I’ve hung onto them for so long.
So here’s the first image: my binder.
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This binder is new. I threw out my disgusting old binder years ago- it was a fat green binder covered in 20-year old dirt and grime. I wrote “JACK'S POKEMON CARDS” on the front cover in big blue permanent marker and stuck a few Pokémon stickers on it. I moved the cards over to a temporary red binder for a few years, but that was nothing special. Just a plain red binder.
This year I finally decided to get a real binder for my cards, and here it is! It has Charizard, the rarest and most prized card of my childhood, on the front cover. Tomorrow I’ll crack it open and show you what’s inside!
One final note: this single binder is all that remains of my collection. "Back in the day," I had multiple binders and literal shoeboxes filled with cards. Like most of my friends, I got rid of almost all of them over the years. I kept 1 of each Pokémon and saved them so that I would have a complete set, but once upon a time I had like a thousand of these things.
Makes me wonder what goodies were hidden in the lost collection? I’d bet some of the most rare ones were in there. Since I wanted the cleanest looking cards, I’m betting there were a bunch of 1st editions, maybe a handful of shadowless cards, and probably a decent number of misprints. All cards that a 12 year old kid would look at and say, “This one looks bad. I like the other one better, it looks nicer.”
Oh, well.
Click here to see what's inside!
