Which Pokémon cards are worth money?

Work through the stack in one pass and make two piles: cards worth a second look, and everything else. The marks below decide which pile a card goes in. None of them tells you what a card is worth. They tell you which cards are worth finding out about — the ones that can turn out to be worth far more than you thought — without spending an evening on the rest.

Start with the cards that shine

Tilt each card under a light. Foil is the fastest filter there is.

Holo rares have foil in the artwork itself: the picture shimmers and the rest of the card does not. In the older sets these are the cards people were hoping to pull, and they go straight to the second pile.

Reverse holos are the opposite: the card's body is foil and the artwork is not. Most are a common or uncommon card printed with a foil finish, so they are worth setting aside but rarely worth much alone — the exceptions are older reverse holos and the rarer cards printed that way.

Full-art cards, where the picture covers the whole card, textured cards you can feel with a finger, and gold cards are the rare tiers of the newer sets. So are cards whose names carry a suffix — ex, EX, GX, V, VMAX, VSTAR — with a boxed rule at the bottom. All of them go to the second pile.

Read the bottom corner

The bottom of the card carries three things that sort it faster than the artwork does.

The rarity symbol. A circle is a common, a diamond an uncommon, a star a rare. Newer sets add more symbols above the star for the rarer tiers. Circles and diamonds without foil are the bulk of any stack.

The collector number, printed as a number over the set's total, such as 4/102. A card whose number is higher than the total — 105/102, say — is a secret rare, printed beyond the set's official count. Those go to the second pile, whatever they look like.

A black star in place of a set symbol marks a promo card, given out at events, in boxes or with other products. Many are common; some are not, and a promo is always worth checking by its exact number.

Give the oldest cards the closest look

English cards from the first few years — the ones with a Wizards of the Coast copyright line at the bottom — are where the largest differences hide, and they hide in details that are easy to miss.

A 1st Edition card has a small black stamp reading "Edition 1" just below the lower left corner of the artwork. On the very first set, a card may also be Shadowless: no drop shadow along the right edge of the art box. The same card with and without those marks can be worth wildly different amounts, so an old holo is never "just a Charizard" until you know which printing it is. The guide to 1st Edition, Shadowless and later print runs shows the marks side by side.

Japanese cards follow different rules and a different market. If part of the stack is Japanese, keep it apart; this page, and GrailFox, cover English cards only.

Condition decides more than people expect

Two copies of the same printing are not the same card. White flecks along the back edges, soft or bent corners, a crease, scratches across the foil — each one moves a card down a condition grade, and buyers price the grade, not the name. A card that has been in a binder for twenty years can be in excellent shape or can have picked up a ring dent from the binder itself.

Handle the second pile by the edges. Do not wipe, press or flatten cards; that tends to add damage rather than remove it. Put anything that looks good into a plain sleeve before you do anything else with it.

Grading — sending a card to a company that seals it in a case with a condition score — only makes sense for a card that is valuable in top condition and looks it. A phone photograph cannot judge that reliably, so treat any grade an app shows you as a guess.

What is usually not worth much on its own

Commons and uncommons without foil, basic energy cards, and most cards from recent sets that were printed in enormous numbers. This is almost always most of the stack, and it is the pile to stop agonising over: it is worth something by the hundred, rarely by the card. What to do with it is its own question, answered in what to do with bulk Pokémon cards.

Then check the cards you set aside

For each card in the second pile, find the exact printing — set, collector number, and any variation such as 1st Edition or reverse holo — and look up what that printing sells for in the condition you are holding. The guide to what a Pokémon card is worth sets out how to do that by hand and how to judge a figure you find.

Or photograph each one. GrailFox names the set, the collector number and the printing variation, then shows the market value for that print in the condition you choose, with the marketplace the figure came from. When it cannot settle the printing from the photograph, it asks you to choose rather than guessing, and a photograph it could not read costs nothing.

Today the app reads one card per photograph, so for a large stack the sorting above is still the fast part: scan the second pile, not the whole box.

Before you sell anything

A market value is an estimate of what the card sells for between collectors, not an offer. A shop that buys your cards has to resell them, so it pays less than that figure, and different buyers pay very different amounts for the same stack. Know what your best few cards are before anyone else looks through them, and never let the only valuation in the room be the buyer's.

If you want to keep the cards instead, the second pile is also your collection's starting point: sleeve it, record it, and put the rest away safely.