Dratini · Silver Tempest, what to know.
About the Dratini card
Dratini sits at #129 in Silver Tempest, released in November 2022. Silver Tempest is part of the modern English Pokémon TCG era and uses the standard contemporary card frame and rarity tiers. Illustration by kurumitsu.
The flavor text on the card reads: "Dratini dwells near bodies of rapidly flowing water, such as the plunge pools of waterfalls. As it grows, Dratini will shed its skin many times." Pokédex entries from this era are short and often quirky, written by the original Japanese localization team for a specific stat-block layout that no longer exists in modern cards.
About Dratini in the Pokémon world
A Dragon-type sea-serpent Pokémon. Famous for being the rarest Pokémon in the Safari Zone in Gen 1. Base Set Common Dratini has sentimental demand thanks to game rarity.
Print variants and how to spot them
Silver Tempest shipped in Holofoil, Reverse Holo, V, VSTAR, Radiant, and Trainer Gallery prints. Radiant cards are a shiny-treatment rarity tier introduced in Astral Radiance. Trainer Gallery cards are numbered TG01 onwards as a parallel subset.
Grading and condition
Modern Commons grade easily and trade thinly in graded condition. Raw pack-fresh copies are the practical buy for set completion. PSA 10 submissions on a Common from a modern set rarely return enough premium over raw to justify the service fee.
If you are buying this card
Raw copies of this card are inexpensive enough that the grading math rarely justifies submission unless you have a clearly pack-fresh example. For set completionists, picking up a clean raw copy and sleeving it is the practical move.
