So! If you read the last article, you know there are only a few different types of cards to worry about – so how can the hobby get so expensive? My average complete PP card set costs me $25-$35 to complete if the PP set is current and widely available on the market. For the Card Captor Sakura series of five PP sets, though, for which it would normally cost up to $175, I have already spent $300+ on the set due to my wish to collect the SP cards that come one to every third or fourth full PP Pack. And I have dozens of spare common sets to unload! Anyone need a CCS PP4 common set for $8? ^_^
Full sets of boxed cards can cost anywhere from $50 (if, as in the Flame of Recca set, they are kind enough to include all rares and commons in one box and there are no SP's) to $500 (my Magic Knight Rayearth Tomy Premium set passed this before I found the last SSP variant I needed). The most dedicated North American card collectors I know have from 100 to 150 sets, whether complete or in progress. I have about 200 myself, at an average cost to compile of about $175, meaning this collection has over $35,000 invested in it. To put this in perspective of what I might have put into my collection, I've compiled a list of card sets that are either current in the market, recent enough to be available due to non-sold Japanese items surfacing here, or that surface occasionally from collectors cleaning house.
If you checked the link, you will have found over 1,000 card sets to tempt any collector, and I'm well aware that the list is nowhere near complete at this time. It's no wonder that the most successful card collectors, in addition to devoting a lot of monetary resources toward the hobby, also have the bargain hunter's instinct, a love of sniffing out new sources, good deals, neglected treasures and items in attics. My correspondents mentioned enjoying the addition to their mailbox, the art on the cards, finding shiny special cards, and completing their sets. I think that underneath this they must also have a real pleasure at the moment of finding a set they've been hunting for ages, a bargain or some new gewgaw they didn't expect. It's rather the Goodwill Junkies' approach to trading cards, and is probably pathological.
But what, you say, if I don't want to get into this much? What if you'd just like to pick up a few cards here and there and be content? While I might have a moment of smiling at the probabilities of anyone who starts staying interested in just a few sets and being content, there are a few sets you can start with that are fairly easy to come by on the current market and won't bankrupt you as long as you don't go hunting for SP cards.
Ojamajo Doremi Trading Collection Light – one box includes three full common sets, two and a half full sets of the rares, and two sp's out of three. Don't go hunting for the other SP or you'll need anywhere from one to three extra boxes to find it (despite the odds being in your favor. Cards work this way so appreciate it when things work out more easily!).
Card Captor Sakura – just start with the most recent PP set and be happy with the commons and rare metallics from it. Picking up four or five pull packs will probably get you all the rares as well as some to trade and three extra full common sets for that pack.
Card Captor Sakura – or start with the CardCaptors set released recently in the U.S.! It's very pretty, with nifty gold embossing, and for once you can read everything on the card. You can get some already-compiled common sets for as little as $5 from collectors selling their spares. The same is true of the U.S. Gundam Wing releases. ^_^
I would not recommend starting with Sailor Moon cards unless you're willing to settle for a card here or a card there – or to plan in advance to invest a $$$Lot$$$ of money into collecting sets. It seems like everyone and their sister is into Sailor Moon. I stay away from them as I don't have the energy to fight for them, but I did pick up the new film collection trading card packs that have come out in the U.S., as they're cheap and easy to collect without getting wounded by enraged SM fans hunting cards.
One of my correspondents mentioned that she knew some people who had gotten into card collecting with a competitive attitude, that they were going to beat someone else at it. It's a tough hobby, and she and I both recommend letting that kind of attitude go, because then the 'sport' won't be any fun – because you're very likely never to complete some of your sets. Get into it with a sense of fun, an investigative spirit, and enjoy yourself scrounging around for interesting things, and you're more likely to enjoy the hobby. Getting competitive about it will probably ruin a few chances to share the fun with others, and will definitely make it tougher for you to hold the line on how much you want to buy. Having one set often leads to wanting another. So what if you're falling down that slippery slope? Be as prepared as you can for the slide! Once I'm really into this hobby, how do I find what I need without losing the rest of my clothing in addition to my sock drawer?
There are a number of different ways to obtain new cards.
If you have any Japanese knowledge, you can check Japanese sites, although many won't mail outside the country. If you have friends in Japan, you may be able to make good use of them to get cards at a much lower cost than you might in the U.S.
Checking ebay is another possibility. If you do this, please don't just start jumping on cards left and right! Watch and wait; review past postings to see what has been posted before and the final sale price, spend a few months searching out all of the anime trading cards listings to learn how much things go for on average, low and high cost days before you plunge in. Sometimes you might be enchanted by some new item that's listed as 'rare,' only to find that there are really a dozen of them available if you only wait another couple of days. Only experience will make this sort of information a more useful thing, as freak incidents (both in high costs and low ones) occur all the time, so even after those first months of research, keep watching the site and learning from what you see.
There are very few 'neighborhood shops' that carry anime trading cards, and those that do are usually overpriced, and vastly more so in the center of the continent than on the coasts. For a beginner, I'd recommend looking at online shops for cards. Here are a few North American sites that have a good range and good prices and carry these as a normal part of their stock – I shop at each of these regularly:
Noriko's at Darkharbor,
House of Anime,
WizzyWig,
Splash Page Comics.
These are all shops I frequent normally because they are good folks with fair prices (watch out for poker cards that are bootleg on one or two of these sites, although all of their trading cards are ok). Check them all to compare prices and sets available before buying anything. Don't just stop here though, look through all the sites you can find online, as sometimes shops that don't specialize in this area have odd and interesting items for low prices, and you might find more shops that have this good of a selection and good prices too. You can find an extensive vendor list on the online shopping area of the Anime Web Turnpike at http://www.anipike.com. Sometimes you'll find things that are just goofy, like the shop that says 'We now carry a wide assortment of Japanese anime trading cards' and on that page you find one Dragonball Z set, a single autographed American Lady Death card, Marvel overpower superhero cards and a Magic booster set. But sometimes even on a page that has little to do with cards, you can find an odd box of something unusual and nifty for cheap.
Most card collectors won't give you a list of where they shop or where they find unusual things in particular – the information itself is very valuable, since other people could buy out scarce things or buy the things they might otherwise have traded for. Some people can really be obnoxious if you show them bargains too – they buy them all and mark them all up to sell to everyone else. (Good way to get a bad name.) So be ready to do a lot of searching online. Here's one hint – Anime Oh! has a bunch of Slayers Try Perfect Collection boxes at $35 each – normally $70+! They also have cool 'snotkitty' pouches that I love (ok, it's the cat from Magical Drop, Baka Neko) because they are very cute and make my fiance very nervous. (What kind of person is this, that she likes to make her fiance nervous? And she likes things she calls 'snotkitty?') Two later updates – it appears Anime Oh! may be out of business, sigh, and snotkitty turns out to be from Magical Drop. (Magical snot drop? No, no, no…)
Another interesting place to shop is anime conventions. Sometimes you can find out of print things there that aren't on web sites anywhere, and sometimes you can find a wider range of titles than you found online. But it's another place to make sure you don't do any impulse buying – check prices online thoroughly before buying, and check the entire dealers' room at a convention when you know what you want, to see if anyone else has it a dollar cheaper. Scan things quickly so you don't come back to the first shop and find your treasure gone!
How much is a pull pack worth? It depends partially on age, rarity and popularity. The only pull packs for which I have paid more than $15 were the Rayearth PP2 set. If I found Fushigi Yuugi pull packs with the hard prisms, I would also pay more, and I would pay much more for Akazukin ChaCha pull pack cards or Slayers Try pull pack cards, as I have yet to find a set of either for sale anywhere in the U.S. in the last eleven years. Other collectors would likely have their own list of what they're willing to stretch for based on personal interests. Most pull packs are about $10-12 in the U.S.
How much is a box pack worth? Take a look at the price in Yen, usually printed on the packs' foil covers. I try not to pay more than 2/3 over the original price, but sometimes stretch to twice as much for something I *know* I'm not going to find again. When buying new, be sure to check the number of cards in a pack and the number of cards in a set before you decide that a $4 pack is a bargain. It may or may not be, depending on whether it's got 4 chromium cards, 10 common cards, or vice versa. If I found a severely rare pack for a set I'm trying to complete I might pay a bit more than I otherwise would, but I would really think twice about it if so. Usually I go rummaging around to try to find a better deal first. How much are boxes worth? Normally if you buy full boxes you'll get a discount from what the price would be if multiplied per pack. Beyond that, it will vary as widely as the pack prices do. Look at all the web sites you can for a good idea of likely ranges.
How much is a single card worth? Usually the only places that you'll find which will sell individual cards are individual people with trading pages up (we'll get into trading more in the next installment). Generic prices I posted in 2002 were about $.50 for commons, $.35 for pp commons, $.75 for commons of unusual things like bookmark seals, $3-5 for pp prisms, $3-4 for rares, $6-$10 for sp's. Generic prices in 2007, due to the long economic slump and many older collectors passing out of fandom, would be about $.35 for commons, $.25 for pp commons, $.60 for commons of unusual things like bookmark seals, $3-4 for pp prisms, $3 for rares, $5-$7 for sp's. But this is just a baseline, which can vary (usually upward) based on: Popularity of the set, scarcity of the set (how many were imported, how many of those sold already), age of the set (contributes to scarcity), and special qualities of the set (for instance, chromium cards and plastic cards often cost more, as they cost more in retail sale).
Examples – cards from the shoujo manga sets for Hana to Yume and Asuka were only released in 2000, but sold like hotcakes, are difficult to find now, and commons can trade at $1 each. But commons from the chrome-lined Speed Racer set which is in low demand go for about $.10 or less per common. The U.S. Cardcaptors and Gundam sets are also very low priced since they are freely available here (although the Cardcaptors set is quite pretty). I might not be able to sell my Atelier Marie specials because even though they're pretty as no one knows the set. My Vampire Miyu specials would go for $15 to $50 due to their popularity and rarity, and I recently sold a Slayers Next special for quite a bit more, as it was the last card someone needed to complete their set and they're impossible to find now even in Japan. For some specialized high-demand sets, the best thing you can do is to look at other people's sites and ask their opinions – one very good use for the anime cards mailing list (more on this later). If you get a range of responses from people who aren't buying the card themselves, you'll get a good start on knowing what your card is worth – for something like a Sailor Moon card that has its own cult following, I would really recommend some personal research and asking around, because prices can vary widely for different sets and sources.
It matters whether a card is a legitimate item or a bootleg. While people may have an interest in the images on bootleg cards, they are not collectors' items, and many collectors are offended at their very existence both for personal ethics and because they've been stiffed on a deal or two when they thought they were getting something real. The copyright on the cards matters a lot – there should be one! Images should be crisp, clear, and well-cropped. A $20 card is worth pennies if it turns out to be a fake.
Hopefully this gives you a good start on finding anime trading cards to buy and knowing the worth of what you find! Next article, we'll talk about finding other people's spare cards to trade or buy!