We Didn't Plan to Start a Master Set - Then We Counted Our Surging Sparks

We've been having a lot of fun lately just… opening stuff. A booster here, a booster bundle there, the occasional Elite Trainer Box when a set really grabs us. No master plan, no chase list taped to the wall — just the good part of this hobby, the part where you don't know what's behind the foil yet.

Then one night we actually counted.

Turns out we'd opened enough Surging Sparks — a couple of ETBs will do that — to be a real chunk of the way through the set. Not "a few nice cards" through it. Meaningfully through it. So we did the thing you're not supposed to do if you want to keep your budget calm: we laid it all out, grabbed a binder, and started counting slots. That's how a master set sneaks up on you. You don't decide to start one — you look down one day and realize you're already holding one.

And "the set" isn't 252 cards. A Surging Sparks master set is 417.

This kicks off a new weekly series on YouTube we're going to try out — we're calling it Master Set Monday: every Monday, a new episode showing what we grabbed that week, or cracking packs from our current sets to fill the slots we still need.

You'll see things fill in in our digital binders here on the site too, so track along with us! Real progress, at a real family's pace. Some weeks it'll be packs, some weeks a small singles order to fill gaps, some weeks not much at all — and we'll say so. Episode 1 is Surging Sparks, and we've got our work cut out for us.

▶ Watch Master Set Monday EP. 1 — Surging Sparks on YouTube

So what's a "master set," exactly?

For us, a master set is every card in the set, in every version it was printed in that language. Ask ten collectors and you may get slightly different wording — but that's ours. For Surging Sparks (SV8), it breaks down like this:

Surging Sparks master set = 417 slots
• 252 numbered base cards (commons up through special illustration rares)
• + a reverse holo of every common, uncommon & rare

That reverse-holo half is the part nobody posts about. Reverse holo commons aren't glamorous — nobody's filming a hit reveal of one. But they're in the set, and a master set asks you to care about every slot, not just the ones that trend.

Honestly, that's the part we've come to like most. A binder with every card exactly as Pokémon printed it tells a complete story.

Where we are on the Surging Sparks master set

Right now, we're sitting at roughly 70% of the base set. A lot of that last stretch is commons and reverse holo commons — which sounds like a grind, but it's turned into our favorite part. We've been hitting local card shops and digging through bulk boxes, hunting the specific cards we still need. There's something great about flipping through a bulk bin and pulling out three slots you can finally fill.

The hard part is still ahead of us: the ex cards, illustration rares, full arts, and special illustration rares. Those are the expensive slots, and there's no pretending otherwise. Our plan there isn't to bulldoze it — it's to save up a little at a time and lean on trades, using some of our other hits to move toward the cards this binder actually needs. It'll take a while. That's fine.

Our outlook: no timeline, just chip away

Here's the honest philosophy we've landed on, and it's the whole reason we're comfortable starting something this big on a normal budget: we're not putting a clock on it. We'll chip away — open a little more, grab singles at the local shop, hunt at the next card show — and let the binder fill in over months, not days. The hunt is better than the finish line anyway.

Tip: lay the binder out with placeholders for the cards you don't have yet. When you're standing in a shop staring at a bulk bin, the empty slots tell you exactly what you're looking for — it turns "I think I need some commons?" into a real, shoppable list in your pocket.

And we don't think this'll be our only one. Journey Together and Perfect Order are in a similar spot for us — we've opened a good amount and already have a solid piece of each base set — so those binders are going up on the site too. We'll be chipping away at a few at once.

How did you start yours?

This is the part we're genuinely curious about. If you've built a master set, how did it start? Did you wait until you'd stockpiled a big pile of base cards and then decided to commit? Or did one big pull land in your lap and basically dare you to chase the rest of the set around it?

Come tell us over on our Master Set Monday videos how yours started — and which set we should chase next. We'll take our time, we'll chip away at several at once, but we can't wait to call our first master set "done." See you next Monday.