Correct me if I’m wrong but I actually feel the opposite of this. I’d prefer it in a Cgc slab as long as I have a documented receipt it seems Cgc honors their guarantee based on the refunds we have been seeing in regards to the protos. If it were BGS I know I would have no chance and if it was PSA I’d be very concerned. Just my thoughts on this.
This is far more difficult if we are being realistic than most would seem.
What makes it an awarded copy? That it is older? The set I purchased with Cullers in early 2016 was a set of three in a storage unit. Would three being together and left in something like that likely be awarded copies? Possibly? Maybe an old school collector bought them all and put them together, or maybe they were an employees.
Does having the trophy case make it an awarded copy?
I have personally purchased empty trophy cases. Though I wouldn’t lie about their pairings, it is a very real possibility someone else could as I missed a few that were on eBay for tmbs and pikas.
At this point for me I prioritize buying from people I know or care about more than the idea that I’d be able to prove it was from the winner.
I think the only card I have that can be straight linked is a no. 3 pika half art from 2013 and an Art academy from noodles
6 Likes
Do you think it would be helpful to continue the process in the post you linked? Take every illustrator and map it to a position on the sheet based on the holo pattern. Compare that to how many sheets we may expect and see if there are any patterns or anomalies. Not sure if that would actually be insightful or not.
2 Likes
I think it’s fair to assume majority of the copies sold prior to pkonno were awarded copies. I can trace many of my purchases back to winners. Also there was less incentive to sell and the sales frequency felt more organic. Funny enough, I actually met the guy that bought the storage locker with the pika trophies!
Even if we speculate there could have been extra copies, the waters were less polluted 10+ years ago. Today the water is muddy. I agree with Faz that the best bet is someone trustworthy who knows the provenance. It will be interesting to see if there is a separation in value between awarded and extras.
6 Likes
I saw Akabane printing illustrators at 7/11 during my trip to Japan if that means anything
19 Likes
I was there with Akabane, we did it for lols.
6 Likes
My concern with CGC is based less on the end results of the prototype scandal (for all intents and purposes, a good response) and more the philosophy that led them to grading the cards in the first place. CGC prioritizes relationships with high-end, individual submitters. These submitters receive perks in exchange for grading with CGC. The reason why we got the prototypes to begin with was that CGC took the word of a high-end individual submitter and didn’t do their own due diligence as to the cards’ authenticity. If we’re skeptical about a relative flood of old back trophies, CGC has proven themselves to be not only the most vulnerable to exploitation, but also the most willing to compromise for hype.
I believe it was @HumanForScale on discord who noted that in order to produce convincing fakes, you would need three things:
- Access to original materials (holo cardstock)
- Access to original card images/printing files
- Access to an offset printing facility willing to print the cards
In my opinion, the last one is the hardest to achieve and the reason why we haven’t seen convincing fakes. Finding holo cardstock isn’t all that difficult, anyone could buy an old back sheet on eBay and acetone it if they really wanted to. Akabane gets us one step closer to convincing fakes because he seems to have access to original print files and the desire to use them to make fakes. However, the best we’ve seen from Akabane and his outfit are trophies printed on a consumer office printer. Finding a TCG-equipped offset printer and then actually using it to print cards is a very difficult prospect based on what I’ve heard. Certainly not impossible, but offset printers aren’t just available for walk-in use.
I understand the skepticism of newer trophies because we are closer than we have ever been to convincing fakes coming onto the market. Several years ago it would have been inconceivable that such a thing would happen. The prototype scandal exposed that several key firewalls which we all thought would protect against fakes (sanctity of Pokemon’s founders, major professional grading companies) have been broken. Now, the only thing that seems to be holding us back is that these people haven’t found the right type of printer. In my understanding that’s still a huge (if not the biggest) hurdle to cross, but I can’t blame anyone who takes a step back and says that there’s too much smoke for there not to be fire on things like old trophies.
16 Likes
Is gaining access to offset printers that difficult? China has the ability to produce TCG cards at a professional level. Their reputation in respecting intellectual property laws is less than stellar. I could believe someone somewhere would do it for the money.
3 Likes
And these bad actors have quite a bit of capital
5 Likes
Can I ask why specifically China? Is a Japanese or American person not capable of this heinous act?
3 Likes
the prices of the cards have become so high nowadays that it may not have been feasible in the past but it is looking more and more likely that someone will attempt it. what does one of those printers cost to set up? $1M, $10M? even if it were $100M at a couple hundred k per trophy card you’ll make back all your money in like 2 sheets 
China is a huge manufacturing powerhouse, the labor and materials are cheaper in China, it would take a massive amount of effort and money to reproduce China’s level of manufacturing in Japan or America, so yes while someone in the United States could make fakes it would cost a lot more than in China and might not be as efficient
Offset printing is very expensive for a couple of reasons (and impractical for any small batch jobs), though you are correct that for enough money and disregard for laws, anything is possible.
-
You need an assembly-line of printing, die-cutting, and final lamination / coating machines
-
Every sheet requires a custom etched series of CMYK plates. These plates are generally laser-etched and can only print the same sheet of cards. They’re not like laser / inkjets where you print off a few cards at a time. You print big sheets then cut them out, resulting in a lot of duplicates
-
Printing plates are often destroyed after being used for their print runs. They’re huge and bulky so it’s easier to recycle them because you’re gonna make new ones for new sheets.
-
No proper printing facility will print copyright work. Counterfeiting is very illegal. You could probably spin one up illegally, but you’d need the technicians to operate and maintain them, who are also all in on the scheme.
Digital files are also the other hard part. Without them you’d have to recreate the files by hand before you’d be able to offset print which is hard without having some small variations that someone is bound to notice from “real” copies.
If Akabane and team had access to all this hardware (assuming they had access to the digital files) why would they ever resort to the prototypes? They could print 10 of each snap card and a few other non-holos like Unikarp / TMB Exeggutor and make much more money than the protos brought in.
By my math they made around $10M from protos if private sales are to be trusted. Publicly they didn’t sell more than $3M on public auction platforms. I did the math for the public sales and I can’t see the $30M number for protos alone adding up
Considering snap cards range from $30k - 200k/ea, it’s way less effort to print and sell those if you had access to all those resources.
Here’s a video of a TCG utilizing these machines. You can see that the volume they’d need to be printing is massive and would probably be noticed by the market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvOKeGthxhU
29 Likes
Makes me wonder, what would be required to produce a card essentially the same as one printed in the 90s… I don’t think manufacturing scale or material/labour costs matter if you’re able to successfully print trophy cards without people noticing the difference
Edit: Humanforscale’s post above is really insightful!
5 Likes
lurking this thread n I got a tutorial to start my own trophy factory
17 Likes
I think the most likely scenario is that the additional copies surfacing are extras kept by employees who had access to them at the time they were printed.
Since there was no way of knowing how valuable/significant they would become, I’d be surprised if the Pokemon company had strict controls/policies in place to limit how many were printed and/or dispose of the non-awarded extras at the time.
If this were the case, it would at least provide a plausible explanation as to why the presumed extra copies seem to be in relatively better condition than the presumed awarded copies.
The fact that they seem to be originating from Akabanes orbit is kind of a catch-22 for me. On one hand… he would have had access to the unawarded trophies from back in the day. On the other hand…well ..we all know his track record 
4 Likes
Humor often highlights the things on the fringes of truth. Sometimes, it merely shines a light on reality. On rare, glorious, and scary occasions, it writes itself.
I don’t think it’s proof that there is a problem, but I think there is more than mere smoke at this point. There is a fire. And while that fire may be burning in another place, it’s very possible that the embers will spread.
Ultimately, if we’re talking about investing, risk, business, and objectivity, then I have to agree with this. I think it’s the best summary of CGC’s position in thsi situation and the market as well. The mindset of “profit > all” “opportunity > risk” is not just morally problematic, but bad business practice when your reputation is what sells your product. CGC’s entire business relies on their reputation, and that is in tatters, AFAIC.
Hey E4, think as a community we could buy-out CGC, in a plausible future where they fold due to incompetence and reputational decimation? 
1 Like
If you recall CGC’s articles on how they verified some controversial test print cards (protostoise and disco holos), you can see they have at least some fancier methods (e.g. XRF) of investigating cards when the origin may be more dubious. They probably don’t bust this out for every trophy card that comes their way, but they at least have the capability to examine the ink at the elemental level to look for any differences (against a known awarded prize card).
This would be yet another obstacle that would be hard to bypass if printing in today’s time: finding ink with similar composition as that that was used for these trophy cards. I am working under the assumption that certain brands and maybe even batches of ink may hold “signature” compositions (even if you could identify the brand/supplier, their formula may have changed in the last couple decades). Obviously if that doesn’t hold true and different offset printing facilities utilize ink from different sources that can’t be reliably distinguished, XRF may not be entirely that useful as a methods of authentication.
8 Likes
This a great summary. I’ll also add that there are much smaller scale local offset printing facilities available, which are easier to access.
They are companies dedicated to print testing. One of my old companies would use them regularly, because it’s a huge waste of time/money to halt production on the commercial printers and swap print plates for early test prints.
We would use the test prints as controls, which would then be sent to the commercial printers across the globe to match to when it came to final production.
As you said, it still requires finding employees willing to break to law for you. But also they are trying to match colours and laminates etc. to something that already exists, which takes a lot skill and technical knowledge to get right.
11 Likes