Are the cards inside Japanese Jungle short packs different?

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TLDR: No, I don’t think so. But I hope there is.

Since I found out about Japanese Base set and the no rarity variant that can be found in short packs. I’ve had a hope that Jungle, which also has a short pack variant, could also have differences within the cards that distinguish them from the regular cards found in long packs.

The pack on the left is the short pack, the one on the right is the (normal) long pack. I assume, that Jungle short packs had a similarly short production and release as Base short packs did. I believe the reason for the two different packs is that retailers requested Media Factory to include the hole in the top foil so they could display them on hooks.

Given that no rarity has various well known errors that were changed for the rest of the run, but afaik, Jungle doesn’t.

It follows that Jungle cards were printed later, after Media Factory had ‘ironed out the creases’, but still had the earlier type short packs in inventory, and thus used them for the initial release of Jungle. But without the early card errors seen in Base.

Or did they?

Being a pretty ardent sealed collector, opening short packs myself wasn’t on the agenda. Fortunately a mercari seller had 15 opened packs, of which I managed to get 4. Sadly the rest are scattered to the winds.

So now, I’ve photographed each unique short pack card (25) and a normal long pack counterpart. I tried to keep each photo as similar as possible, and that all cards are in the correct order - short pack first, long pack second.

I can’t see any text, layout, symbol, data differences between. I think there is a consistent small change of colour saturation between them - that being the short pack cards are lighter overall and long pack cards being darker and more saturated. However, this is normal and likely due to ink or printing fluctuations during production.

Click the line below to show the photos

Now, hopefully the photos are hid behind this spoiler to save everyones data

Click the line above to show the photos

If anyone can see anything I’d love to know. I think it’d be really cool if there was a something to look out for, and that Jungle could have a variant.

Here’s all the photos in an imgur album - imgur.com/a/b7sYjbh

And here’s a list of things I learnt whilst doing this:

  • It took way longer than I thought

  • If I had shot both cards in the same image I could have saved time

  • I don’t like the way I write, feels clunky

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I always wondered if the short packs were produced on behalf of a large retailer that didn’t use hook displays in its stores. I have no idea which retailer that might have been, so it’s pure speculation on my part.

In any case (pun intended), congrats on the Mercari purchases!

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Very interesting!

I was hoping there would be something, but it seems that it is not the case.

I heard of some differences on the Venomoth (link here), can you see anything on the listing pictures by any chance?

Edit: can confirm the first 10 cards shown here are absolutely identical.
Will carry on overlapping them one by one later on!

Edit2: all perfectly similar up until Paras (17 cards), will finish tomorrow.

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So a personal anecdote, I went on a buying spree for Japanese base Venusaur about a year ago. I think I had around 8 of them at some point and I noticed one was bolder. The differences, while subtle, are apparent but I guess not enough to be a considerable variant.

I wonder if there was any manufacturing overlap between base and jungle where both underwent a tune-up/revision and the later prints were thus darker. I did see a post on instagram that had a similar theory with base, but all of this is speculation. Still interesting stuff

Below are photos(scans?) from CGC so we can assume they’re fairly consistent in how the pictures were captured. The venusaur on the right shared a similar value of green to a Chinese venusaur I had at one point. Anyways, all speculation but still cool to discuss

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God I could stare at that JP 90s packaging all day. Some people say there’s a limit to nostalgia, but not in THIS case. And, a very interesting post, TY.

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@smokemon, Love this, on IG Pokemonpacific also had a post showing this with Charizard. I think it’s not confirmed although looks much like it, that the later print run is more saturated. Some believe it’s a different print run while others believe it’s just the printers ink.

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There would have been a lot more than 3 print runs. Even in 2001 when The Pokémon Center Company took over they had to print more Base Set cards to meet the demand, and that’s 4 and a half years after Base Set was released:

It’s my belief that 2001 Jungle packs also contained the corrected Venomoth card mentioned above, just as the 2001 Neo 1 packs contained the corrected Pichu, Typhlosion, Quilava, Donphan and Dark Energy cards.

This isn’t his copy but @prochaos sent me these images back in November 2020 which I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing here…

This is the regular Jungle Venomoth:

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Here is the corrected one:

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The difference is in the text on the special ability.

Despite looking on and off for a copy for myself I have yet to see any of these appear for sale. I’d say they’re a lot rarer than the Neo 1 corrected cards, likely implying that the 2001 Jungle print was a lot smaller than the 2001 Neo 1 print (which would make sense considering Neo 1 was a lot newer).

Apologies for going a bit off-topic here, but hopefully the above info is useful to someone.

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@pichufan Ah this Venomoth I think is new to me! Thanks for sharing the photo.

I apologise I shouldn’t have used the term print run as I don’t generally mean only 3 print runs for the set. More so a change in the printing of the cards. Whether they changed the colouring or the ink used the cards are of noticeable difference.

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I didn’t know about the difference in venomoth :blush: I’ll check my higher res screenshot of it in a bit.

Thanks for the confirming with those cards. When they were in my photo editor (I didn’t change anything btw) I was flipping constantly between them while looking for discrepancies. I couldn’t think of a way do that or share it here it either though.

Same, all that stuff really scratches that part of my brain that says ‘dis is gud’.

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Yes, I can see the darker colour on the right venusaur. What also stands out to me is the thickness of the text for ‘Mitsuhiro Arita’ at the bottom, pretty much all the black text below the image is heavier than the left venusaur.

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Thanks for sharing this!

I actually read the thread mentioning the Venomoth and how it had a difference of a couple characters earlier last week, and I could not find a single picture on Google image of the corrected version, despite going for over a hundred.

The print run must be extremely small considering the pack variation is also pretty much never seen, and the gigantic amount of the original Jungle print run that was produced diluting it further.

Proving your theory would be most likely one of the most unfeasible things right now, you’d need to find some packs, gather the courage to open them, AND pack the Venomoth (1 chance in 16)…

I’m amazed to still learn more after all this time collecting Japanese old back cards!

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Unless I’m missing something, it appears that the correction is simply to fix the line break so the word ねむり (“asleep”) appears on the same line (which also results in the particle を moving from the end of the first line to the start of the second line). Or maybe one of the kanji is incorrect? It’s too difficult to me to tell from these medium-resolution images.

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I think it is just the “no” particle being added after “card” at the very beginning!
And that shifts everything along.

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Yes, you are correct! Thanks for pointing it out. I read right over the missing/added の.

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I think the venomoth in the other seller listing is the normal uncorrected version. There seems to be a gap at the end of the third line of text, with line 1 and 2 being ending roughly at the same point.

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Yep definitely the normal one. Thank you!

Makes sense, but still nice to confirm!

I wonder how many other Jungle cards have been corrected… If corrections include something as subtle as this, and the cards are as rare as it seems, it would be likely that another corrected cards exist and slipped through for over 20 years!

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There’s potentially a way to find out. The guy who rediscovered the Dengeki Pichu correction from Neo 1 at the end of 2020 did so by reading through the Pokémon Card Neo 1 Handy Guide - a TCG play guide which explains how each card can be played and features a number of corrections.

I made a post about the Pichu variant including the relevant page from the guide along with a picture of a key which denotes changes:

The changes are denoted in the key with different circle characters:

  • A black circle ⬤ means there are no changes;
  • A white circle ⭘ means the description has been changed;
  • A circle within a circle ⭗ means both the description and function has been changed.⁣

Here’s a side-by-side scan of that part of the book next to a screenshot of a translation from Google Lens:

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For the Pichu card, it shows a scan of the original uncorrected card but notes the corrected description with a white circle. This corrected description is what is included on the corrected card:

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The downside to this though is that the book notes a lot of corrections. In fact, I’d probably say around 40-60% of all the cards in the set have corrected text noted in this book, and those cards definitely weren’t ever printed. Furthermore some corrections we did see printed (like Donphan’s missing “10x” attack text) are not noted in the book.

A further downside in terms of the Jungle set is that these Handy Guides to my knowledge were only made during the Neo-era, so I’m not sure which book would contain corrections for earlier Japanese sets.

Essentially, if you could track down a similar source for the Jungle set you could then compile a list of all corrections and trawl through cards until you find any matches, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing that as you’d probably go crazy staring at the same thing over and over again.

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Very interesting again!

According to Instagram I did see this less than a year ago as I commented, but the booklet definitely slipped off my mind…

I don’t even know where to research if such a booklet exist for Jungle, but will keep my eyes open.

I will say though that the numbers might be against us, if for Neo 1 I would say around 2 to 5% of the cards are corrected (to take with a grain of salt, I don’t actually have any solid evidence, just my feeling from actively looking for the 5 corrected cards last year), it seems like it might be an even much lower ratio for Jungle judging by how hard it is to find even a picture of the Venomoth. So even if we know what to look for, finding confirmation that it has actually been printed differently might be extremely tricky.

Maybe someone with coding skills could program something to extract and compare pictures of Jungle cards from databases, but this is probably quite difficult due to lighting/angle/contrast etc making an accurate comparison very tricky to do.

Edit: for what it’s worth, none of the 93 sold listings registered by PSA are of the corrected version.

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Oh cool, I didn’t know they used the handy guides to find that out.

As for Jungle paraphernalia, right now I can only think of a poster checklist probably from a corocoro magazine. I have one that I can find.

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