Pokemon TCG Treasure Hunting #2 | Cosmic Pikachu, where are you: Getting a boost from my energy cards
- Professor Ash
- Jul 21, 2024
- 4 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
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 remember watching the Pokemon anime as a little kid watching Ash's and his little furry pals adventure and this card truly captures that emotion, I love it. I've also only recently got into Slabs, previously sticking do my binders and have a lot of space in my newly mounted slab case i want to fill.
Can my bulk help me get there? Let's find out.
The rules
Only set's from Sun and Moon and X and Y can be used, and only regular common, uncommon, rare and holo rare's cards and reverses 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!
The progress $16.05/$160
After week 1 we have made solid progress towards our goal. We have sold 16 of our 35 trainer lots and netted just over $16 towards our goal. Pikachu is one step closer.
On the downside the cards that were sold were largely the higher value ones we were selling in sets e.g. muscle band, teammates vs seeker, and they sold a fair bit below their avg. selling price. This is not surprising as we used the auction method to sell. However it does mean the ones that are left will take longer and not net us so much so it looks like we'll be towards the lower range of our estimate of $35-$45 for our trainer bulk. Below is a spreadsheet of the breakdown of what has/has not sold for those who are interested.
We did sell 2 of our dimension valley cards at a net of $0.99 each and these were sold as buy it now's. Long and short we will try to sell a couple more this week using buy it now to try and maximize our profits and switch to auctions after a week or 2 if they don't sell.
Pokemon TCG Treasure hunting in my energies
Energy cards? That's right, energy cards!
Considering even base set energy cards only go for a few cent's can there really be value in these things? Well to be fair in regular energies, no. However there are plenty of special energies that do hold value and many of these were printed in the sun and moon, x and y era's. The gym leader challenge format (go here if you are interested) is keeping a lot of these cards usable in the TCG scene. When they stop being legal in GLC then its likely a lot of these cards won't hold value anymore as few collectors are after these and so demand will dry up.
Now is a great time to rummage through and see if we have any special energy cards we can sell and get us closer to our $200 goal.
What are the prices?
One thing I noted for these is that the no. of sales for a lot of these cards is slow. That means if you want to achieve top prices you may be waiting a long time. So for this challenge it may take a long time for these to feed through into our goal.
A few of the prices that stood I'm listing below. Feel free to see if they are in your collection!!
I am thinking I will set these up as buy it now's and if we have a lot available in a couple of weeks trying to switch them to auctions and if that fails combining them into auctions just so we can see some funds feeding back into our goal even if we don't achieve the best prices.
It will also be interesting to see what is really achievable with some of these cards so you are more aware of what can be sold in a reasonable amount of time if you are looking to do something similar.
Whats the hidden value in my energy collection?
Anything with a value of more than $2 or where I could sell it as a set for more than $2 i tried to find. Here's some of my hits below.
In total I've added 18 more lot's and a total of 35 more cards. I have multiple double colorless from different sets. It will be interesting to see if any have more intrinsic value or if BIN or auctions gets the best value out of these. I have set up a variety of different ones to run an experiment on this.
Hopefully we'll be able to net $20-$25 from this collection
Wrap up
Feel free to check out our ebay store here if you would like to bid on any of the finds :).
I'll be back in a week with an update of our progress and what we are looking at next for hidden value.
Enjoy your week of Pokemon TCG treasure hunting and remember to chill like Maggie!
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