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Cataloging my childhood Pokémon collection

A new lease of life for my 20 year old cards

2 min read

I’ve finally got around to organising my childhood Pokémon TCG collection - storing them in set order, in sleeves, in proper binders. I’d already done this for my complete Base Set, but my other, half-finished sets, had never received the same treatment. A new TCG shop just opened up in my town and they stock a fair amount of vintage cards, which made me want to organise my own collection, see where the gaps were, and then look at filling them in

After looking through my childhood binder (you know the one)

The OG Pokémon ring binder with the green background, yellow, red and blue circles, and a sleeping Snorlax front and center. There's a Sandshrew and a Meowth around the "Pokémon Trading Card Game" logo

and documenting the collection in an excel sheet, I realised that I was more or less 50% complete with the Original Series. I literally didn’t know that sets were categorised like this until I embarked on this project. So for anyone else that didn’t know, the Original Series was released between 1999 and 2000 and includes

  • Base Set
  • Jungle
  • Fossil
  • Base Set 2
  • Team Rocket
  • Gym Heroes
  • Gym Challenge for a total of 705 cards

If you want to see what my childhood collection looked like, as well as my progress in filling in the gaps, I’ve added a Pokémon TCG dashboard

And if you’re curious about my "setup" for storing these cards

(This is not an ad, and none of these are affiliate links. Vault X is on the pricier end but the product quality is incredible, even down to the packaging)

I’ve got 3 Vault X 9-Pocket Zip Binders - one red, one blue, one yellow. For storing these 7 sets, there are a lot of empty pages, but I wanted to make sure that the sets were in order, each new set started on a new page, and that a single set was entirely contained in a single binder

Every card is in an Exact Fit Card Sleeve

And then for any special duplicates, or any of my pricier modern cards, I’ve got Toploaders and Magnetic Card Holders. For the magnetic holders, I found these 3D printed hangers for an IKEA pegboard that the card holders can stand in. I plan on getting a few of them to display cards with cool artwork

And then for any extra bulk that’s worth keeping safe, I’ve got a 450+ Card Box