u/ghettoblush

The same question goes for the Enhanced ME01 booster box. I'm hearing conflicting information online.

Sharing my Night Cyclone Darkrai 🌀 for Pitch Black!

Note: I graded two of these on my own and bought the rest in April/May.

How do we all feel about these slabs moving into the PSA freeze?

I believe that BBWF is constructed in a way that the graded IR 10s will be ridiculously scarce relative to other modern slabs.

The odds of pulling each specific IR is almost on par with that of pulling a specific SIR. It's not just the pull rate either; If you go on TCGplayer today and filter on NM for any BBWF IR, the total supply is tiny because the IRs are broken up across 139 illustrations.

Now add on top of that the gem rate for a 10. Most of the BBWF IRs I've seen have really hard gem rates across the board. For instance, the Chandelure has the HIGHEST gem rate in the photo and it's sitting at less than 30%. Most of the other cards in the photo hover around 10%-20%, with some as low as 4%.

These aren't the most popular Pokemon, but we've seen time and time again extreme scarcity pulling up prices of niche slabs to ridiculous highs (reverse stamped Delta species for instance).

I will preface this by saying that I have been actively buying from the sets I'm about to discuss.

We're seeing crazy run ups for slabs in so many pockets of the hobby, whether it be vintage, ex era, XY, tag teams, SWSH alt arts, or ultra modern. I still think there's a lot of opportunity out there, though.

Here are 3 pockets of the space that I think still have a lot of room to grow when discussing PSA 10 copies:

1. Pokemon Trading Card Game Classic

• shunned on release, only seeing movement in the past 6 months
• extremely low POP relative to Celebrations and ~40% gem rates on the most popular gen 1 Pokemon like Charizard, Blastoise, Venusaur, Mewtwo, or Pikachu
• the foiling pattern is gorgeous and has no ugly stamp, unlike Celebrations 2025

2. Legendary Shine Collection

• very low pop by JP standards, most cards sit around or below 2000 total PSA 10 population
• iconic legendary Pokemon with cameos from other legendaries
• the English versions sit at single digit populations and basically don't exist
• beautiful crosshatch foiling that the English versions don't have
• the collection is over 11 years old

3. English PSA 10 BBWF IRs (of noteworthy Gen 5 Pokemon)

• set structure causes the pull rate of specific IRs to be almost on par with that of a specific SIR
• most have very low gem rates on top of this - Terrakion is POP 2 for example
• NM raw supply is almost non-existent for many Pokemon
• hard pull rates coupled with even harder gem rates will keep these extremely scarce

What do you think? Are any of these sets worth it in your eyes?

I got lambasted for discussing the potential growth for this slab last month because it's Volcarona and "not a card people care about grading". Now it's breaking $1K and I think it could climb even higher.

If you had one, would you sell or hold?