So I’m working on an Obsidian Flames Grand Master Set, but the reason I even started collecting is a bit different.
A few years ago, I was diagnosed with bone cancer. My oncologist has a shared waiting room for both adults and kids, and honestly… there are way too many kids in there fighting cancer. That part never gets easier to see.
With Pokémon blowing up again over the last few years (don’t get me started on scalpers), the doctor and some families organized a binder challenge for anyone who wanted to join—kids and adults. People donated a ton, and they ended up with around $7k worth of packs. So every appointment, you’d get a pack. Big surgery coming up? You’d get an ETB. Stuff like that. It was actually really awesome.
At first, I kind of joined in casually. I had this “binder”… which was really just something I used for documents. Every visit, kids would run up asking to trade, I had to show them my empty binder so I started picking up cards.
Apparently I was doing it completely wrong. I had cards in piles, boxes, no sleeves—just chaos. One day, some kid left sleeves for me with a message:
“Give these to the old tattoo guy and tell him to get a binder. That’s bad binder habits.”
Yeah… fair enough 😂
So I fixed my setup—got sleeves, got a real binder—and started learning. I’ve never collected cards before, so I had no clue about the etiquette. And that definitely wasn’t my only mistake.
I was ripping packs from everywhere—Scarlet & Violet, Stellar Crown, Obsidian Flames—just going wild. Then I realized it’s not about getting every Pokémon, it’s about completing sets. That flipped a switch.
Turns out this hits the same part of my brain as 100% completing video games. So now I’m master setting Scarlet & Violet, Stellar Crown, and Obsidian Flames. Then a “helpful” gamer friend dumped all his extra 151 cards on me… so now I guess I’m doing that set too. RIP my wallet 💀
The good news—I'm in remission now. So I decided I want to Grand Master Set Obsidian Flames as kind of a “I made it” milestone.
And yeah… I went all in.
Trying to find a complete checklist has been an absolute nightmare. I’ve been using PriceCharting, and it’s probably the closest thing I’ve found, but it’s still incomplete. This whole process opened my eyes to how many variations exist—cosmos holos, stamped cards, staff promos, regional variants, prize packs, etc. And not every card even has normal/holo/reverse versions like you’d expect.
I prefer pulling cards “in the wild” instead of buying singles (even if it’s less efficient), and that’s actually how I realized some lists are missing stuff—because I found cards that weren’t listed anywhere.
The ones that really threw me off as the website did not show them in their master list:
- Umbreon 130/197 (Trick or Trade )
- Town Store #196 (Prize Pack Holo) — and apparently there are multiple versions (normal, reverse holo, cosmos holo?)
- Various Trick or Trade variants (Umbreon, Houndour, Houndoom)
- None of those showed up on the main lists I was using—but I pulled/found them myself.
At this point, I’m also including:
- Any Obsidian Flames stamped cards
- Jumbo cards tied to the set
- The two SVP promos that share artwork with Obsidian Flames
So yeah… I’m deep in this now. Missing a few cards here and there, but fully committed.
If anyone has a truly complete Obsidian Flames checklist (including all promos, variants, prize packs, weird edge cases, etc.), I’d really appreciate it.
Yeah… it might actually break me 😅
Where i sit with it .
I am missing 97 cards, Some Rev holo , Comos and promo and a few that might be super hard to get staff and champion winner only cards.