🛒0
CardSpicy

Collector’s Library

CardSpicy writes about Simplified Chinese Pokémon cards, PSA 10 slabs, protection and cross-border buying. Every guide below is written in English from our own stock, our own listings and our own order data — and each one links back to the products it describes. If a product is out of stock, the guide still tells you what to look for.

Jump to: Start here: Simplified Chinese · Sets, volumes and gold cards · PSA 10: grading, care and storage · Protection and storage · Sealed product · Ordering, pre-orders and shipping · Collecting plays · Character rankings: Top 10, Top 5 and full card guides · Market and prices

Start here: Simplified Chinese

What the Simplified Chinese branch actually is, how a card number reads, and where the price ladder begins.

Sets, volumes and gold cards

Volume by volume set guides, the Collect 151 artwork chase, and the gold prints that only exist in this branch.

PSA 10: grading, care and storage

How a slab fails before the card does, what to do the minute it arrives, how to photograph it, and what it physically fits in.

Protection and storage

The three layers of protection, sleeve materials, and why bending and fading have two different causes.

Sealed product

Whether to open a sealed box or keep it sealed — the arithmetic behind the decision.

  • Open a sealed box, or keep it sealed? — Three 30th Celebration sealed products, three different answers – and why price per pack is only a real number when the box is a box of packs

Ordering, pre-orders and shipping

What the 30-day pre-order window covers, and what changed for US parcels after de minimis ended.

Collecting plays

Themes you can finish, an entry price ladder, gift decisions and regional favourites.

Character rankings: every character, priced

165 pages, one per character, priced from PSA 10 valuations. Four shapes: a Top 10 for the deepest pools, a Top 5 for the rest of the characters that trade, a full card guide for the shorter pools, and a print checklist where no graded copy has sold yet.

Top 10 — the 15 characters with the deepest pools

Top 5 — 30 characters, five cards each

Card guides — 83 characters, every printing listed and priced

Print checklists — 37 characters with no graded trade yet

Market and prices

Where the ceiling of the hobby actually sits.