The deck that recently won the Kyoto Champions League, and many of the other decks in the Top 32 of this 1489-person tournament, used Reshiram & Charizard-GX as their primary attacker. This is of course bad news for collectors who are used to seeing the vast majority of Charizard cards seeing only fringe play at best in tournaments, meaning they'd only usually have their fellow collectors to compete against to obtain the latest version of their favourite Pokémon. Despite not being legal for play in official Pokémon events (outside of Japan) until May 18th, the card has dominated recent events in Japan shortly after its release in Double Blaze. I touched upon it earlier the playability of the card in tournaments. Next we have to ask is a simple question why? Why is this card reaching new heights for a non-promo/staff stamped card, so soon after the set launch?
However if we look at recent eBay sold listings ,we can see that three have sold for $250-$285 which is still almost double the prerelease price. Now, only one week after the set launch, the card has seen multiple buyouts and now (as of May 9th 2019) has only ONE copy available on the popular USA-based website Troll and Toad (TnT) at an incredible $399.98, almost three times the amount the card was selling for during the prerelease window!įor context this is only the price the retailer is asking for it as there is no other copies currently available to purchase through TnT. It didn't take long for players that like to have “max rarity” decks (most expensive/rarest versions of a card in comparison to the cheapest) and collectors to realise how much more elusive and difficult to obtain, compared to its Burning Shadows counterpart. The very first of these hyper rare Reshiram & Charizard-GX cards that were pulled were only selling on various Facebook groups around the $100-140 mark, which seemed a reasonable price in comparison to the Burning Shadows hyper rare Charizard-GX released nearly two years ago. Two weeks before the official set launch on May 3rd 2019, prerelease events around the world were held, in which players and judges could get hold of Unbroken Bonds cards early. With the Japanese version of the Reshiram & Charizard-GX hyper (rainbow) rare still selling for only $45-55 on eBay, not many would of expected it's English counterpart to be the hot ticket as it has rapidly become. When Double Blaze (one of the Japanese sets that makes up Unbroken Bonds) was first announced, Charizard collectors around the world were excited to be adding not one, but FOUR new prints of their favourite Pokémon to their collection. Let's take a closer look at why this card is now selling for over $250 (USD) within a week of launch!
With the release of the recent Unbroken Bonds expansion, the Pokémon TCG also received another huge chase card in the form of the Reshiram & Charizard-GX hyper rare.