Trading card games

Gold Secret Rare

Also written: Gold card · Gold rare

A Pokémon card printed in metallic gold and numbered past the end of the set — including, often, energy and trainer cards.

CoatingThe card reflects light differently

A gold secret rare is a Pokémon card given a metallic gold treatment and placed past the end of its set's numbered checklist — "secret" meaning the number runs beyond the total printed on the card. The gold usually covers the frame and much of the face, and the surface is typically worked with a fine texture.

How to spot one

• Metallic gold on the frame and background, not a gold-coloured illustration. It reads as metal, not as paint.
• A card number higher than the set total printed beside it. That is what "secret" means here, and it is the check that separates a genuine secret-numbered card from an ordinary gold-looking one.

The trap in the name

Pokémon applies the gold treatment to whatever it likes, and that regularly includes basic energy cards, item cards, tools and stadiums — not only headline Pokémon. So a card can be correctly described as a gold secret rare and still be a gold basic energy that nobody is chasing. The phrase "secret rare" does a lot of work in a listing title and very little work on the actual value.

Read what is on the card before you read the rarity. A gold treatment of a subject people collect behaves like a top-tier chase; a gold treatment of a utility card behaves like a novelty. Both are the same rarity.

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