Good morning! Let's see what you've got here. Thanks for waiting while I got back to you. Before we get started, I want to answer your question upfront about those cards you found with $1,000 asking prices. This is important to understanding how Pokémon cards are valued and where these kinds of prices come from. This is discussed in the OP but I'll provide a succinct explanation here.
Condition is king in Pokémon, like with most collector's mediums. People want quality cards in as good condition as possible. Many people buy and sell cards loose leaf, but this is a real pain. People have wildly different ideas of what "near mint" means and many auctions will not describe the card at all and just task you with looking at the pictures. Therefore, it is more work and sometimes more difficult to get a card in quality condition. This is where graded cards come in.
Graded cards, like the auction you linked, are cards that have been professionally evaluated by Professional Sports Authenticators. They grade the card on a scale of 1 to 10 and encapsulate it in a tamper-proof plastic container, which you can see in the auction you found. PSA grades 8, 9, and 10 are the high end of the market and what most people are after when they seek out graded cards. But getting these grades can be very difficult, especially with old Generation I cards. So any graded card, especially 1st Editions, is going to be worth a lot more money to collectors who can now buy it with an assurance of quality.
Now, all that said, this Hypno is not worth $700, even as a PSA 9. This is a live auction, meaning it hasn't sold, which is crucial. People can ask whatever they want for their stuff. So when assessing the value of your cards, it is important you look at
sold auctions. What people are asking doesn't mean as much compared to what people are paying.
When we search sold auctions instead,
we can see a PSA 9 1st Edition Hypno sold on the 18th for $133. Nothing to scoff at, but not $700 either. As I go through your cards, I will give you estimates based on
sold auctions for
ungraded cards.
- The Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur trifecta is great to have. These sell very quickly and in all kinds of conditions because these are the cards people specifically seek out when they start collecting Pokémon again. Of all your cards, these will be the easiest to sell. You can sell them individually or even as a trio because there's a market for people just getting started who want them all at once. These are all the standard unlimited prints of the cards. Charizard sold for $500 flat this morning (and other $500 auctions are linked throughout the thread, so this price is very stable right now). Blastoise has several auctions that listed for around $200 that sold to best offers (not disclosed), but that's safely a $150 card. Venusaur is in a similar price range as Blastoise. These three card on their own are worth at least $700, which is amazing, right?
- You correctly observe that Gengar and Hypno are 1st Editions, which is great. 1st Editions are always worth more money. These cards are only modestly valuable, but they still sell easily because people often collect 1st Edition sets one card at a time. A Gengar did sell for $241 yesterday, but to tell you the truth this seems too high. This is probably the result of just a couple of over-eager bidders. Other auctions in the last three days have Gengar moving for $100 flat, which is more in line what I expect. Hypno is in a similar position here. There is a high-end auction that went for $279 yesterday, but this strikes me as high. I would expect that $80-$100 in this case. I'm not sure what's up with the recent auctions that went for 2.5x market value. Sometimes it just happens. But it's good to be realistic.
- As for your Japanese cards, that's outside my expertise. Japanese cards are hard to price in general. But Lugia is worth a little something for sure. But if you search sold listings, there's auctions as low as $30 and as high $222. I see lots of auctions in the $60-$70 range though, which seems like it would be easy to get. Japanese card prices are all over the place for various reasons. So while it's hard to give you a good sense of what they're worth, it's still worth exploring what they'd sell for. So keep your expectations in check but you might be surprised. I'm going to leave it at that for the JP cards because I don't want to steer you in the wrong direction. Someone with more experience with Japanese cards might be able to chime in.
- As for the rest of your cards, you have some nice holos mixed in to the other pictures. Zapdos and Moltres may net you more than the others, but you can generally estimate holos to be worth $10 and non-holo rares to be worth $4. This is a very rough estimate, and some cards might surprise you, but this is a good way to establish a sort of baseline value for a mixed lot. You don't want to over-estimate and you want to have level expectations on your return. When it comes time to list them, you can look for a more concrete price to start at. But if you scoop them up now with these numbers in mind you have a couple hundred more bucks in your more supplementary cards.
So you have a lot of money here! Over $1000 for sure.
The next question is now, given how this post started, whether it would be worth grading your cards. Grading cards takes a long time, costs money, but can massively multiply the amount of money you'd get out of any given card. Your most gradeable cards are Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur. But whether or not they're worth grading is really going to depend on you being honest with yourself about their condition. You want at least 8s to make the investment worth your time and effort. But as you can see,
even PSA 8s command
a ton more money over their ungraded counterparts. This value only increases further and further if you get back a 9. It's not likely you will get back a 10. 10s require
really fresh cards. But 8s and 9s are serious money depending on the card.
But not every card is worth grading. As we saw with the Hypno, it really doesn't go for that much more money to sell a PSA 9 Hypno than just selling it as it is. This wouldn't be worth the time/money sink to get the card graded.
Let me know if you have more questions! :)
