Pokémon Jungle

Pokémon Jungle arrived in English on June 16, 1999 (it had come out in Japan back on March 5, 1997), the first expansion to follow the original Base Set at the absolute peak of American Pokémania. Where Base Set had introduced the game, the 64-card Jungle set widened it — set among the Generation I Pokémon of the Kanto region's Safari Zone and packed with the creatures kids most wanted on cardboard.

Its headline cards were the Eevee evolutions — Vaporeon, Jolteon, and Flareon — alongside prized holos like Wigglytuff and Scyther. Wizards of the Coast made a notable design choice: it included non-holofoil versions of the rare holo cards too, which padded the set out and meant a booster pack was no longer guaranteed to contain a shiny holo — a small heartbreak with every pack you tore open.

Jungle is also legendary for its misprints. In the unlimited print run, all of the English holofoil rares were accidentally printed without the little set symbol that marks which expansion a card belongs to — creating a whole class of "no symbol" error cards that collectors still chase. For millions of kids sorting cards on the bus and the lunch table in 1999, Jungle was the first taste of the endless expansion treadmill that would define the hobby.