Live Now on eBay: 1st Edition Squirtle

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 Squirtle” 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.

Squirtle is a Basic Water with 40 HP, illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita. With this much supply, simply wait for a perfectly centred copy; there is no reason to accept a weak one.

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

Squirtle 63/102 is the Common, non-holo Water-type of the 1999 English Base Set, and it occupies a particular place among the set’s 102 cards: it is the earliest stage of one of the three Kanto partner Pokémon, the species a whole generation of players met first. It is not the Wartortle at 42 or the Blastoise at 2 — those are different cards at different numbers.

The printing in scope is the 1st Edition: the first run of the English Base Set, issued in January 1999, and the only one to carry the small “Edition 1” stamp beside the illustration window. It was produced on shadowless stock — thinner text and no drop shadow behind the artwork. Squirtle is Common in every run, so collector demand rests on the stamp and the earlier stock rather than on scarcity of the card itself. Before the set reached shops, an even earlier print reached playtesters inside a prototype deck.

No other card in the set carries quite Squirtle’s cultural weight. The species became a fixture of the early anime through the Squirtle Squad, a crew of abandoned Squirtle in sunglasses who turn town firefighters in an Indigo League episode; Ash’s own Squirtle joins his team at the close of that story and returns to the squad years later.

The name is a piece of design history as well: the Japanese original means “money turtle,” recalling a pond turtle named for an Edo-era coin, while the English name folds “squirt” into “turtle.” Atsuko Nishida designed the creature by working backward from its final form, and Mitsuhiro Arita illustrated card 63.

How Rare Is This Card?

Start with the two numbers that describe the whole card: roughly 6,356 graded copies exist in PSA, and about 952 of those are PSA 10s. That is a gem rate near 15.0% — 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.

This is one of the most heavily graded cards in Base Set — a Common Basic, cheap to submit, printed in huge numbers, and still being submitted today. That volume is exactly why a high-grade copy stays affordable.

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

Cross-checking the four standard references — Bulbapedia’s error-card list, PSA’s Pokémon Error Guide, the PokeBeach misprint database, and Elite Fourum’s WOTC and English Base Set misprint guides — turns up no Squirtle error catalogued for the 1st Edition printing.

The Squirtle errors that are documented belong to other printings: the “Red Diamond” Squirtle, a small magenta obstruction over its lower text, occurs on Shadowless copies; the “Name Obstruction” Squirtle, in which the lower halves of the final letters of the name are cut away, occurs on Unlimited copies and is recognised by CGC but not by PSA; and a reported green-line variety has surfaced in only a handful of examples. The “Length” text error does not touch this card either — that belongs to Bulbasaur and Kakuna. The 1st Edition print is not error-free as a category, but its defects are generic: smeared front stamps, or an inverted stamp transferred onto the card back.

What Makes This Card Collectible?

Squirtle is collected because it is the starter most people actually held first:

• The Squirtle Squad. Abandoned Squirtle in sunglasses, turned town firefighters — one of the most recognisable things in the animated series.
• A name with a story. The Japanese original means “money turtle,” after a pond turtle named for an Edo-era coin.
• Designed backwards. Atsuko Nishida built the creature working back from its final form so the evolution would surprise.

The line continues at Blastoise; the Base Set hub covers the full run.

The Artist: Mitsuhiro Arita

Mitsuhiro Arita is one of the illustrators who defined the look of the original English Pokémon TCG, and Squirtle 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

Squirtle is the starter most collectors actually owned, on the card whose animated story — the Squad in sunglasses — is remembered better than almost anything else in the series.

People Also Ask

Is my 1st Edition Squirtle 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?
The gem rate here is one of the best in the group, so a sharp copy is a fair candidate — but the card is cheap, so the fee is a large proportion of the money, and the result is a small number either way. 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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