Pokemon TCG Treasure Hunting #1 | Cosmic Pikachu where are you: Sifting through my bulk trainer collection
- Professor Ash
- Jul 12, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 28, 2024
Hello my fellow Kikians! Do you have lot's of modern bulk building up in your closet? Do you think it's all worthless? This series focuses on looking for hidden treasures in our Pokemon TCG collections that may be worth more than you would expect.
The Goal: $0/$160
The goal is to turn our bulk into Pokemon gold!! I want save up enough money to pay for a chase card I've wanted for a while, the Cosmic Eclipse secret Pikachu, and not just loose but a real PSA 10 slab. I have a Pikachu binder with many gaping hole's but this is one of my true favorites from Sun and Moon I never pulled.
As this is the first post in this series we currently have $0 in our budget. The current price for a PSA 10 Pikachu is $160.
Only set's from Sun and Moon and XY can be used, and only regular common, uncommon, rare and holo rare's cards can be used. So no ultra rares, art rares, full arts or promos. I want to really uncover some cards where the value would surprise us.
Can we turn our trash into gold? Let's go treasure hunting!
Treasure hunting in my bulk trainer bin for Pokemon TCG gold
I am, like many of you, sitting on a lot of bulk. When I open my bulks I try to sort my swaps into common/uncommon, reverse's and rare's, trainers and then my hits. I'm far from militant on this practice but it does mean a lot of my trainers are in one place. This make's it easier if I ever do want to rummage (sort!?) through them. Here's my current collection of bulk trainer cards.
These have just been sitting in my closet, building up over the last couple of years. To start this I went to pokedata.io and started looking through some of the current prices of XY and Sun and Moon sets looking for the most expensive regular trainer cards.
What are the prices?
A few of the prices stood out which I'm listing below. Feel free to see if they are in your collection!!
It's worth noting that there were a lot more trainer cards than this worth more than $1 each (at least according to pokedata). These were just some of the one's that really caught my eye as I was sitting on a few town maps, vs seekers and muscle bands.
I'm hoping this can really supercharge me towards my goal. Also the sold prices between TCGplayer and ebay often vary quite a lot so please double check depending on your platform of choice.
Whats the hidden value in my trainer collection?
Anything with a value of more than $1 or where I could sell it as a set of 4 for more than $2 i tried to find. Here's some of my hits below.
I also had a few dive balls and net balls and an AZ set. When listing on ebay selling as a set of 4 is often beneficial for the buyer and seller. The buyer is often looking for 4 to add to their deck for competitive play. The seller can reduce shipping costs and send in bulk therefore increasing margins.
As well as the 13% sale fee you need to rake ito account shipping supply costs and a $0.40 sale fee. This is important especially when we are talking about cards that are only worth around $1. For example if you sell a card for $0.99 and $0.64 shipping fee (standard 1 ounce tracked shipping cost on ebay) then with all the costs you will receive only about $0.30 as net profit. That's why it is important to either find cards of higher value or package multiple orders/cards into a single sale.
I set them all as 7 day auctions, although this may not get best value it should sell them quickly and validate if the pokedata pricing was accurate or not. It will also allow me to report back to y'all more quickly and hopefully get to my Pikachu prize!
Wrap up
Feel free to check out our ebay store here if you would like to bid on any of the finds :).
From the bulk we managed to make a total of 35 listings with an estimate take how value of $35-$45 after fees. We'll report back in just over a week on how successful we were, which trainer cards seem to be the most popular and how much progress we made to our goal.
Enjoy your week of Pokemon TCG treasure hunting everyone and remember to chill like Kiki!
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