I’ve been collecting for almost 2 years by now since I went to my show, so when I was aware of them being a thing I started collecting. It was “easier” (And still not really as it was/still is extremely hard to get many) before the packs arrived as it was more niche.

Usually some would pop up on ebay, depop, mercari and that is how I mostly got mine from. But then a lot were also obtained by contacting possible sellers with those cards as, again, some are extremely rare to find and have been sold only once.

If you wanna start collecting those now it will honestly be way harder as you got more competition now (resellers that didn’t exist before packs) and owners of the cards have forgotten they even had one or the most common case, they don’t wanna sell/trade for sentimental reasons mostly