I was subscribed to Nintendo Power in 1998-1999, so my first card was the Base Charmeleon inserted into the March 1999 issue. I didn't know anything about Pokemon yet, but within a couple months I made my first true purchase, the Zap! theme deck. Every store was either sold out of Pokemon cards or charging scalper-like prices for a lot of the year, not all different from what we see today sadly.
It was so fun looking up all the upcoming Gym cards in Japanese and seeing cards that they never released in English at all like the Vending sets. I collected a lot of the initial sets (e.g. Base, Jungle, Fossil, Base 2, and Rocket), but I never had an entire set completed as a kid, and I kept my cards in Pokedex order in a binder, but I never had all 151 Pokemon back then either. I can still remember the 10 Kanto Pokemon that evaded me in childhood: Pidgeot, Nidoking, Clefable, Poliwrath, Alakazam, Chansey, Scyther, Ditto, Snorlax and Moltres.
I had some of the Neo cards when they were new, but I was falling out of Pokemon in 2002 and 2003, and the TCG was one of the easiest parts to let go back then. In late 2008, I thought it would be funny to buy some packs to try to get cards of newer Pokemon, which reignited my goal of completing the Pokedex in card form, which snowballed into getting every card with unique artwork for my favorite Pokemon, which avalanched into me completing every English set.
I haven't left since, although 2025's releases and the general atmosphere in the hobby have made it very appealing to quit. Ultimately there's going to be 6 English sets from this year alone that I cannot and will never be able to complete, and that's been a source of frustration for somebody who has been a completionist and crazy collector for 25 years. Still trying to adjust to the idea that it's valid not to care about $600 gold cards that look like printer errors. On the other hand now we get releases like illustration rares for long neglected Pokemon, like my avatar, so I guess there's still some validity to it all.
