Pokemon TCG 30th Anniversary Dream Set

30th Anniversary = Best Time for Reprints

Over the years, I've not held back in my criticisms over the evolution or rather, devolution of the Yugioh Card Game but if there's one thing the game has always done well are reprint products and the reprinting of cards in general. In fact, you could say it's what yugioh does at all at this point since the most profitable and successful products are the grand reprint products filled with nothing but holo reprints for existing cards. It's at a point now where certain familiar cards, Mystical Space Typhoon or Stardust Dragon for example have more than 15 different print versions. You could say it's overkill.

On the contrary, the Pokemon Card Game has been the worst on the subject of reprinting the same cards and no, it being a rotation based game unlike Yugioh is not the best of excuses. When the Celebrations 25th anniversary set was confirmed and pokemon actually finally reprinted classic old cards with only aeshetic alterations, I was genuinely happy and excited. This was finally a solid and official way to access some very rare old cards that would be harder to buy today in good condition and at affordable prices for the non rich.

Nevertheless, while a major hit, Celebrations didn't reach its maximum potential in my opinion (in terms of the sets epicness) because only 25 older cards got reprinted. When you consider that some of those reprinted cards weren't even that old (they had to include cards from new gens too for representation) the relevant reprint list become even smaller.

At the time I remember I was inspired by this concept and made my own "custom Celebrations set" that was more worthy of an epic reprint set and a great chance for people to access past cards. With the 30th anniversary now on its way I'll be bringing back the concept of a dream set and share it with everyone. Then, on the video link below I will explain why I came to choose the cards I did for this proper dream reprint set:

Video Link: https://youtu.be/kU9FnVwkfEE

There is always going to be at least some bias in a self made set list, but I tried to represent the history of the tcg over the years and select cards that can act as the "lead faces" of a given gen. For example, one of the weird things Celebrations did is represent a legendary pokemon from a generation and leave out its other version counterpart. They included Team Magma's Groudon but left out Team Aqua's Kyogre. I understand they must have taken the World Championship 2004 into consideration and how Magma won that first major TPCI event but still. They also did this with Umbreon and Espeon Gold Star; they include one and not the other card.

You'll notice I kept a good majority of the cards included in the original Celebrations set because originally this was sort of supposed to be the more complete and full set of what Celebrations should have looked like if you ask me. Since my site doesn't host the entire pokemon card database, I didn't bother including cards from the Scarlet and Violet era and was even very modest with Sword and Shield. Card database or not, at the end of the day I think more priority should be given to reprint older cards with a special anniversary set like this anyway.

As far as ratios and distribution, I don't want to think too deeply about this since it's an imaginery set but, a method similar to how Yugioh reprints their cards in an all foil set would work nicely I'd say. A good example would be their now old Duelist Saga set but there is also the Hidden Arsenal or Rarity Collection model. Lumping these cards together with new cards as they did in Celebrations would be annoying for those of us that don't care about new cards.

Well, that about does it for this dream product, I'll have more to say in my discussion video so make sure to check the link above. Thanks for reading and Wazzuuup!!

Dream Set List