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:
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.