monkey

The true Pokemon rookie cards are the 1996 Japanese Basic “no rarity symbol” edition. These are equivalent to first edition cards for the original Japanese card set; they don’t refer to them as “first edition” so look for designation of “no rarity symbol” in the grading. This means there is no bold circle (symbol) in the bottom right hand corner of the card. These traditionally trade lower than the 1999 Pokemon English first edition cards but the price gap is increasingly getting smaller. For context, there are only around 70 Pikachu 1996 Japanese “no rarity symbol” cards with a PSA 10 grade in the world and they have recently sold for around $8000 or higher. Expect those to go up substantially.