Weekly Roundup #6 – The True Rarities of the Pokémon TCG

The Actual News:

Today’s news will cover these topics:

• The True Rarities of the Pokémon TCG
• A Pokémon March Upscaled For You!
• The First Safari Zone HD Remaster Card

The True Rarities of the Pokémon TCG

Just like with the whole “WATA Games” controversy, where they’re trying to convince me that a copy of Super Mario Bros—one of the most common games ever released—is more valuable than legit rarities like Little Sampson or Stadium Events… I’ve come to consider similar claims to be suspicious, as they’re basically intended to trick people who don’t know anything about anything using terms they may recognize: “I never heard of Little Sampson, but I have heard of the Superb Mario!”

In the case of the Pokémon TCG… well, the Illustrator card is definitely legitimately rare, so I’ll give that a pass when people call THAT the most valuable card. But what’s the next-most valuable card of all time? 1st Edition Base Set Charizard. Yeah, sure, it’s been hot since day one, but still… it’s Charizard. And even then 1st Edition cards are common enough that I think their high value is just slightly overblown. (And I say slightly because… ok, I own a fair amout of 1st Edition Base Set, so I don’t want to totally destroy my investment.)

But still, what are the Little Sampsons and Stadium Events of the Pokémon TCG? The cards which are TRULY rare cards, ones which should be just as valuable as the Illustrator card, especially given their rarity and similar historical collection with the Pokémon TCG’s early years. Well, a couple weeks back over at the TCG Zone channel on the PA! Discord, there was a quick chat about how GC|Linkinboss didn’t realize there was a non-holo print of Black Star promo Eevee, and that’s when byshal shared the following link with us: https://legendary.cards/ …. THIS, my friends, is that true collection of rarities, nay, legendaries of the Pokémon TCG.

Now I don’t want to give away what this site considers some of the legendaries of the TCG, but I will say that I agree with a ton of them… in fact, not only did I see every card that I expected to be on it, but I even discovered that there were others that I didn’t even realize existed! What definitely helps is that each card listed is given a rating between Uncommon to Epic and up to Mythical… maybe you’ve got one of these in your collection? Maybe we can promote this list as the definitive list of valuable cards and help signal boost your collection? In that case, now’s the time to buy!

That said, which ones do I have? Here’s a quick list….

• Base set Ninetales Black Flame on Unlimited Holo (Uncommon) – MAYBE
• Base set Wartortle Evolution Box Error (Rare) – Yep!
• Base set Pikachu 1999 Poketour Promo (Rare) – Yep!
• Base set Pikachu Red Cheeks (Uncommon) – Yep!
• Base set Diglett Fighting Symbol Error (Uncommon) – Yep!
• Unlimited Edition Jungle Holos Missing Set Stamp (Uncommon) – at least a Flareon
• Fossil Unlimited set Zapdos Corrected Evolution Box (Rare) – MAYBE
• Pokemon League Prerelease Stamp (Uncommon) – Yep! (several)
• Duelist and Top Deck Magazine W Wizards Stamp Promos (Uncommon) – Yep! (several)

Alas, mostly “uncommon”-tier cards, with just a couple rarities… like, I managed to get the Wartortle Evolution Box error in a random trade, only because I wanted to add it to my Errors list. Little did I realize that it was a legit rare error! Meanwhile, despite never having visited Australia, I got a Pikachu 1999 Pokétour Promo from Dave Evans, Pokémon TCG art director for Wizards of the Coast… he was just like “here you go!”

But alas, I don’t have any of the TRULY epic rare cards… at least I don’t think. But I DID get a chance in my life to verify the existance of the TRULY LEGENDARY, RARER than the Illustrator card, truly MYTHICAL card on that list: Prerelease Raichu. Yes, it DOES exist, and I have the photos and story to prove it! Here’s the pictures first:

So just a quick story: I’m at GenCon Indy 2003, and this is the final hurrah for Wizards’ after losing the Pokémon TCG license. There would be no Worlds’ either, so this is it. During the last hours of the event, Wizards staff are saying their thanks and goodbyes, also giving out random cards to personally thank the fans for supporting them… so like, someone had a stack of 1st Edition Base Set holos which they let us randomly pick one… I got my third 1st Edition Hitmonchan! We also got packs of some of their other TCGs that they were working on in order for us to move over to them as well, such as MLB Showdown and Duel Masters… sadly neither of them survived. Still, it was a whirlwind last hour or so… and a random question “wanna see Prerelease Raichu?” almost passed me by if it weren’t for the fact that I had my camera at the time. Remember, this was before cell phones and mobile devices, so if I didn’t have my camera out because I was taking pictures for the site, I would’ve never caught these pictures!

But yes, here it is in all its glory: the rarest Pokémon TCG of all time. Rarer than the Illustrator card. Not even Logan Paul will ever own this (and heaven forbid if he ever does!) Unfortunately my pictures are super blurry… I simply couldn’t get the macro view to work right, and the Wizards staff member who owned it didn’t want it out of their possession for too long for obvious reasons… but honestly, I was lucky (and appreciative) to get these two shots!

Still tho, I may not ever actually own this priceless piece of history, but I at least was able to verify its existence and have two photos to prove it. GenCon 2003 was a crazy four days for me, but I’m glad I was able to experience it.

Anyways, you may not be able to own a Prerelease Raichu, but there’s still a lot of Pokémon TCG legendaries you might have in your collection. And hopefully the Legendary.Cards website can help you figure out what those cards will be. And maybe you can convince Logan Paul to buy them off you!

A Pokémon March Upscaled For You!

This is a quickie, but the PokeCa_Art_Life Instagram account—which I mentioned a couple Roundups ago—posted the card art for Pokémon March from Neo Genesis. The fact that the cart art was posted on Instagram like this is beautiful enough… but JP (aka “numberonesoniafan”) on the PA! Discord decided to upscale the artwork using an AI upscaler and share the results with us. And here it is!

Well, this is the smaller JPG version… click on it for the full 3MB PNG version. But yeah, wouldn’t this make for an awesome Desktop picture? Thanks PokeCa_Art_Life and JP for sharing this with us!

The First Safari Zone HD Remaster Card

And finally, last week I shared with you the LAST Safari Zone HD Remaster card… and this week I’ll share with you the FIRST Safari Zone HD Remaster card! …. OK yeah, again, it’s just a technicality, because Aerodactyl is listed first in our Safari Zone number list. But remember, TECHNICALLY CORRECT IS THE BEST KIND OF CORRECT

As a friendly reminder, I like making each weekly release be related to something from before or something to come… well, last week we had some Fossil Pokémon, so that’s where Aerodactyl and Kabuto come in. Plus Kadabra’s coming back, so Kadabra is here! And finally, there was that post about proxies being released, and it “acidentally” revealed the Clefairy card… well, here it is officially!

Y’know, the more I look at these, the more I’m in awe of not only how good they look, but also dream of a world that could’ve been. Imagine if we got these cards for real? Kadabra would be an awesome way to combat Mewtwo-EX from some 10 years back. And Clefairy would’ve been a pretty decent Gust of Wind alternative. Alas, the only way we can see these cards is if we had a way to cross into the timeline where these cards actually existed. Or maybe wait in this timeline and see if we actually release those proxy cards somehow.

OH! BTW, if you want to see the previous Safari Zone cards, I recently updated the Safari Zone HD Remaster page with links to all of the cards released thus far. I hope you enjoy what we’ve done so far! And they’re still plenty more to come; GC|Linkinboss has been trying to get at least one done per day… but y’know how inspiration works, some day you make one, other day you make like 15. Just normal artist stuff.

Anyways, that’s it for now… just a short post this roundup, as it was a slow news week afterall. But let’s see what happens next week! And I hope you’ll join us as well. Good times!