"I have a chance to get this for about $860", a collector wrote under an Expedition Bulbasaur 95 on October sixth. "With all low pop vintage going up", the post went on. Twenty five threads in the investing sub reached for that phrase in the fortnight ending that day.
Expedition Bulbasaur 95 is the low pop vintage card this week's attention doesn't support, because near one copy in three comes back a ten. We upvoted the vintage threads too. Our own board has been reading them all fortnight.
The phrase that ran the sub for a fortnight
Seventy five of the six hundred and fifty six threads were about vintage. The phrase turned up under gold stars, under e readers, under a Japanese Magmar.
"Gem Mint Pop is only 148", read a thread about a first edition Fossil Articuno on October second. Another member asked on October third who was buying mid era vintage at these prices.
Neither thread said how many copies of either card had already been graded. That is the number our tracker keeps, and the Southern Islands Mew the same sub kept naming was the last one we opened.
What low pop vintage Pokemon cards leave out
A ten count is a count of survivors. It carries nothing at all about how many copies went in.
More than four hundred Wizards of the Coast era cards carry a ten count between one hundred and two hundred. Their submission piles run from a couple of hundred copies to near twenty thousand.
What the three of them cost in October
PriceCharting had the Expedition Bulbasaur a little over six hundred dollars in a PSA 10 on October sixth. A graded nine of the same card sat near a hundred and eighty five. This collector was quoted about eight hundred and sixty.
The first edition Fossil Articuno read near eleven thousand seven hundred in a ten that day. The unlimited Team Rocket Dark Charizard read near eight thousand nine hundred.
Those gaps are the whole reason anyone ever mails a vintage card across the country to a grader. We line every nine up against the ten above it on our board of PSA 9 to PSA 10 gaps.
The census the three threads never opened
Our board counts 136 PSA 10 copies of the Expedition Bulbasaur as of October sixth. A common. They came back out of 455 copies ever sent to PSA.
The first edition Fossil Articuno carries 148 tens, almost the same count as the Bulbasaur. Fifteen times. That is the gap between the two piles those tens came out of, 6,975 against 455.
The unlimited Team Rocket Dark Charizard holds 176 tens. Forty times. Its pile runs to 19,862 graded copies, and 412 of them landed in the month to October.
Another 14 copies of the Bulbasaur reached the census in that same month. Fourteen. At that rate the count says more about how few people bothered than about how few copies survived.
Three cards wore one label for a fortnight and share nothing underneath it. We counted where every gold star ten actually sits a fortnight ago and found the same thing.
The collector who says none of this needs explaining
A collector arguing that the market is behaving normally answered all of it on October third. "Why would seven figures for the rarest cards shock anyone", that post read. "The kids who ripped base set are adults with real money".