1999 - 2000 Grand Party Tournament Circuit articles

Articles
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After weeks of translating some of the Trainer Magazine scans that @prochaos uploaded, I’ve finally finished up a series of articles around the tournaments in the “Grand Party” Campaign

For some background, this campaign started with the Challenge Road '99 Summer, and went all the way through to Champion Road 2000. There are some remnants of its branding when the World Challenge Spring started in 2000, but it was phased out pretty quickly. This is perhaps the most comprehensive information available for the Champion Road 2000 tournaments online, as for some reason there’s pretty much no documentation available for those events (RIP geocities).

These tournaments produced some of the most well-known old back promos to date

Formatting in forum threads is difficult, so I’ve linked each article below along with some cool takeaways. I encourage to click through them and especially check out the scanned + translated trainer’s magazine pages, as they reveal some cool details about the tournament structure and deck construction rules. If the site is slow to load please be patient, as my webserver isn’t the fastest!

Challenge Road '99 Summer & Battle Road Autumn '99
pokumon.com/article/challenge-road-1999-summer-autumn/

  • Kicked off the Grand Party Campaign
  • Produced the No.1-3 TMB + SSB promos
  • Made all players who wanted to qualify play with this pile of cards:

Tropical Mega Battle “Best in Japan” + US-Japan Exchange Battle

pokumon.com/article/1999-tropical-mega-battle-super-secret-battle/

  • Was the only time that the Japanese National finals took place overseas!
  • Issued the first Tropical Wind promo
  • Andrew Finch (then a manager at WotC) showcased the infamous Prerelease Raichus here
  • Was probably the highest concentration of children wearing oversized Hawaiian shirts the island had ever seen

Secret Super Battle '99 Best in Japan Match
pokumon.com/article/secret-super-battle-best-in-japan-1999/

  • Exact location is still unknown, but it was somewhere in Tokyo. Secret indeed!
  • Trainers played with a special set of rules by Card Master Takahashi. Unfortunately the scan isn’t high enough resolution to read these.
  • Their lunch break featured a Pikachu dish…

Champion Road Autumn
pokumon.com/article/champion-road-2000/

  • In order to enter these tournaments, players had to fill out their Challenge Passport, which got them the Grand Party promo and a lottery chance of being able to participate
  • This was one of the first tournaments to feature participation / attendance promos!
  • Instead of No.1-3 trainers, winners of the regional events got coins in their trophies. Talk about getting scammed:

Let me know if you spot any errors, and click around the site if you have the time! It helps my SEO :blush:

21 Likes
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Updated some typos (thanks for the pings) and added detailed images of the blue neo passport for champion road 2000! This passport had a pretty short lifespan since it was used immediately for the world challenge summer just 4 months later

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I absolutely love this kind of articles, thank you for that! I wonder how many LP/NM Grand Party promos survived, giving trading cards to kids is a recipe for disaster when protection for the cards was overlooked.

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Incredible website you are putting together, another great article.

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Awesome post, I’m blessed to own the Grand Party in psa 10. Such an awesome card

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Hi all,

A fun discovery that confirms the total number of 1999 Tropical Winds distributed.

For a long time, people thought that only 10 copies were given away at each of the 9 regional tournament. Some would hypothesize that because there were 2 age groups, the total number was 10 copies for each, for 180 total.

The source of that confusion is this page from Trainers Magazine Vol. 3:

1256×897 446 KB

For those of you who haven’t read the article, the Challenge Road '99 summer tournament was broken down into 2 parts: a qualifier and a “Final tournament”. The qualifier was a round-robin style tournament where players were divided into smaller groups and played against each other. Based on your match results, you got differing amounts of points (ex: Win is 2 points, draw is 1 point, loss is 0 points). The top player in each group would advance to the final tournament

The final tournament was a 6-round 1v1 single elimination tournament. This meant that one loss and you were out. From the first magazine scan, we can see that all participants in the Final Tournament received a copy of the 1999 Tropical Wind

The winner of this tournament would be flown to Hawaii for the first Tropical Mega battle in 1999. But what this also tells us is that the total number of participants in the Final Tournament at each venue was 2^6, or 64 total. This means that across 9 tournaments held, there were 576 total Tropical winds distributed this way.

But what does that “10 people” mean in the first image? Well, after the event was over, Trainers Magazine Vol. 3 held a special “99 Person Presents” campaign. In this campaign, 99 winners would get prizes highlighted through the magazine’s special report. 10 of those winners would get the Tropical Wind card, which is what that article is calling out.

You can learn more about this campaign and each of the other prizes by reading this section of the article: pokumon.com/challenge-road-1999-summer-autumn/#99_Person_Present_Lottery

This lines up with the current PSA pop report. There was no way only 90 or 180 copies of this card were distributed if PSA had already graded 71 of them. The total number of 586 Tropical Winds is much more realistic with the graded pop.

What does this do to the price? Probably absolutely nothing. The card is 20+ years old and many copies were lost or damaged as they simply were not too valuable at the time. This is similar to the Tamamushi University Magikarp, which was also distributed in 1999 at a total of 1000 copies. PSA has graded around 90 of them.

This also explains why there are a few Tropical Winds that have “Masaki Marks”. These cards were likely mailed in card holders similar to the ones used in the Masaki campaigns.

8 Likes
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Great work @dreamtech ! This is something that has been bothering me since I got back into collecting.

Looks like the dented Winds are the rarer version :^) :^) :^)

1 Like
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Bumping my price to $1,000,000 rarer than illustrator

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Shoutout to Troy for getting me a photo of his “Masaki mark” wind. 1/10 true rarity card.

1 Like
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Excellent work. I’ve always felt there might have been more than the 180 that had long been speculated. But it’s not a whole lot more. Still an extremely rare and desirable card :slight_smile:

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Fantastic work, and as said it makes a lot of sense!
Again, amazing to be able to clarify that over 20 years later.

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Lol.

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@dreamtech, I love the articles on your website! Well done!