Live Now on eBay: 1st Edition Magikarp

What the card is actually being offered for right now. Every listing below is filtered to the genuine 1st Edition card — no repacks, mystery slabs, card skins, or multi-card lots. These are asking prices, not sold comps, so treat them as the top of the market rather than what copies are changing hands for. Buying through these links supports the site at no extra cost to you.

Which One Do You Have? The 3-Second Test

Most people who say “I have a 1st Edition Magikarp” don’t. Retail packs in 1999–2000 were overwhelmingly Unlimited printing — and that’s fine, it’s the same iconic card. The fast check, in order:

1. Right edge of the art box: a dark drop shadow = Unlimited or 4th Print. No shadow = keep going.
2. Left of the art box: a black “Edition 1” stamp = 1st Edition. No stamp + no shadow = Shadowless.
3. Bottom copyright line: ©1999-2000 = 4th Print. The font weight is the tiebreaker — thin HP text means an early print.

Magikarp is a Basic Water with 30 HP, illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita. Centering is the only real variable on a card this cheap; the printing is otherwise uniform.

PSA 8 prices from PriceCharting sold-comp data, September 2026. Unlimited and 4th Print look nearly identical — the copyright year is the difference. Each printing is its own card with its own price and history; see every printing: 1st Edition · Shadowless · Unlimited · 4th Print.

About This Card and Set

This is Magikarp, number 35 in the 102-card English Base Set, released by Wizards of the Coast on 9 January 1999 as an Uncommon with no holographic foil. The illustration is by Mitsuhiro Arita. The printing in scope is the 1st Edition: the first English run, marked by the black “Edition 1” stamp beneath the artwork and printed on what collectors call shadowless stock.

What sets card 35 apart within its own set is its subject. The Base Set is a catalogue of the era’s heavy hitters, and Magikarp stands among the uncommons as the franchise’s celebrated joke. Its Japanese name, Koiking, points at the carp behind it, and its evolution into Gyarados draws on the Chinese legend of the carp that leaps the Dragon Gate waterfall and becomes a dragon. The joke inverts the legend, and collectors have read the card that way ever since.

That reputation was cemented in the games. In Red, Blue and Yellow a salesman in the Route 4 Pokémon Center near Mt. Moon sells a Magikarp for 500 Pokédollars and gives no refunds, a con that became one of the series’ most quoted encounters; the anime made him a recurring character, and Team Rocket’s James buys one aboard the St. Anne.

Gyarados, the payoff, is a separate card in this set — number 6, a holo Rare — and the two are distinct collectibles. The Base Set Magikarp was reprinted twice, in Base Set 2 (50/130) and Legendary Collection (52/110), both also Uncommon and both reusing the Arita artwork; neither carries the 1st Edition stamp.

How Rare Is This Card?

Start with the two numbers that describe the whole card: roughly 1,874 graded copies exist in PSA, and about 261 of those are PSA 10s. That is a gem rate near 13.9% — and the gem rate, not the raw population, is the number a collector should actually read. High-grade supply is what the market pays for.

PriceCharting population data, September 2026. The modern row is a combined PSA + CGC count; the 1999 row is PSA, the way it is normally quoted.

For scale, compare it with the modern equivalent: a comparable modern chase card carries a gem rate near 29%. Modern cards grade far better than vintage ones — not because they are better cards, but because a 1999 card was printed before grading was mainstream and then spent two decades in a binder. A vintage gem count is not comparable to a modern one.

The graded census here is dominated by low numbers being cheap to submit rather than by demand — which is why the price stays low even as the population climbs.

Population source: PriceCharting, September 2026, PSA column only. Two caveats stay attached to every population figure on this site. Graded counts are submission tallies, not unique cards — resubmissions inflate the total, so the number of genuinely distinct gem copies is lower. And the census is a floor, not a final number: it grows with every submission wave.

Known Error Cards

No error is catalogued for the 1st Edition printing of Magikarp 35. The four standard references — Bulbapedia’s “Error cards”, PSA’s Pokémon Error Guide, the PokéBeach error and misprint database, and Elite Fourum’s Masters Guide together with its English Base Set master misprint guide — list no Magikarp entry for Base Set in any printing.

Two traps are worth naming. The “common printed as uncommon” rarity error belongs to Magikarp in EX FireRed & LeafGreen, not to Base Set 35. And the “missing pupil” Magikarp that surfaced on the forum was attributed to scanner dust-removal settings rather than a printing fault, and appears in none of the four reference lists. What does exist at 1st Edition is set-wide rather than card-specific: grey, thin, smeared or back-transferred stamps, documented across the run and not catalogued to Magikarp.

What Makes This Card Collectible?

Magikarp is collected because the joke is the point, and because the pair is the story:

• The legend it inverts. A Chinese carp that leaps a waterfall and becomes a dragon — which is precisely what this card does when it evolves.
• The Route 4 salesman. A fixed 500 Pokédollars and no refunds, one of the most quoted encounters in the original games, later made recurring in the anime.
• The joke and the payoff in one set. Magikarp and Gyarados both live in Base Set, which is why collectors chase them together.

The pair is the point — the Gyarados review covers the card this one becomes, and the Base Set hub places both in the run.

The Artist: Mitsuhiro Arita

Mitsuhiro Arita is one of the illustrators who defined the look of the original English Pokémon TCG, and Magikarp is one of their Base Set contributions. This section will carry their full numbers when the artist guide lands — how many cards they illustrated across the Wizards era and what one raw copy of each would cost.

Caleb's Collector Verdict

Magikarp is the card you buy because the joke aged well: the weakest creature in the set, drawn with a completely straight face, sitting a few cards away from the monster it becomes.

People Also Ask

Is my 1st Edition Magikarp real or fake?
The 1999 Base Set cards are the most counterfeited in the hobby, and for a raw copy worth real money you cannot settle it from a photo. The checks that catch most fakes: the light test (a genuine card is essentially opaque — a faint dark core line between the layers; cheap fakes glow through), the stamp rule (a real 1st Edition stamp is crisp and sits under the ink, and counterfeiters add stamps to Unlimited cards — read it with the drop shadow and the 1995-99 copyright line, never alone), and the back (fakes perfect the front and neglect the Poké Ball, the blue tone and the repeated text). Above a few hundred dollars, a raw copy should get professional pre-authentication. The full fake-detection walkthrough covers all of it.

Should I grade this card?
At this price the maths usually says no — the graded sale price of a common Magikarp rarely clears the raw cost plus the fee by enough to matter. Grade it for the collection, not the return. See Should You Grade Pokémon Cards? for the fee maths, and check a raw copy with the CardGrader scanner before sending it in.

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