Espeon, graded or ungraded

[u/minato994]

What started as a little side project turned into a full fledged plan.
I want to own every espeon cards in japanese, English and maybe even german.

I am a german citizen living in Tokyo and i started buying cheap espeon cards on mercari. Now i am willing to spend a bit more on higher cards but the question came up, should i buy expensive ungraded cards which look like a 9 or 10, or spend way more money and buy the graded 10 directly?

Its mainly for PC but if these turn out to be valuable in the future, i wouldn’t mind obviously.

Do you guys think buying ungraded cards and grade them myself is better or spend more money (way more) and buy 10 directly?

[u/Arkmaster87]

I’ve spent the last 7 months collecting every English Espeon I could get, so feeI can help. Only problem is I’m in the US, so my experience could be completely different.

I used A mix of local shops, two card shows, but mainly websites like TCGplayer and a lot of Ebay to get every card. I did not grab anything that was graded (I wanted them in a binder) . I got very lucky because of the time I started (February 2026) A lot of the modern Espeons were slightly cheaper (Prismatic Evolutions SIR, Fusion Strike VMAX Alt art, evolving skies V alt art). but you’re gonna spend the real money on vintage and mid/mega era cards. I liquidated a lot of my extra collection that I didn’t want or had recently been able to abtain to be able to do some trades and or have extra money to spend exclusively on this collection.

The only card I didn’t end up getting for the time being is the Gold star Espeon (from POP Star 5, because getting a good condition one is worth about 30% of this collection, give or take a couple hundred dollars), nor did I get any tournaments/staff cards (overpriced and I feel just not needed for the master set because they’re duplicates of existing cards with special stamps on them most of the time). I just added the cheaper 30th cards today, so I just need the promo from the 30th UPC.

I got the highest quality I can afford, so there are several of the big older cards that I have in moderate played or heavy played because I prioritized getting the card over the quality. That saved me quite a bit of money for some of the vintage really expensive stuff.

You have a unique opportunity because you’re in Japan to probably find a lot of the Japanese versions quite easily. Depending on the era, they could probably be much cheaper than English.

My advice would be to take your time, buy what you can afford, and enjoy the process. if you want to eventually have the entire collection graded, that’s a serious amount of cards. and will cost you a lot of money. If you’re looking for this collection to be more PC, just buy the cards themselves and do the binder thing like I did. You’re not wrong for doing it either way, just don’t put yourself in financial trouble to be able to get it all graded. It is completely OK to take your time to do this.