This post is meant to serve as a public service announcement with regards to the existence and legitimacy of Articuno ex, Zapdos ex and Moltres ex cosmos holo “errors” from Firered & Leafgreen. Here is a thread discussing the topic and here is what the cards in question look like:
It has long been theorized that the errors were printed on a separate sheet and the top shard plastic layer was accidentally “left off”. My theory is that these cards have been fabricated and manipulated by manually removing this top layer of shard holo. I have no evidence that suggests otherwise, so here is me creating one of these shard holo “errors” by removing the top plastic layer of a Zapdos ex.
The result is a cosmos holo “error”. The resulting surface of the card is very sticky from the adhesive that kept the plastic on. That is one of the clues that led me to think that this was how these cards came to exist. All of the copies I have purchased so far with this “error” have been very sticky and had strange lines like what you can see results on the Zapdos from peeling and on this Moltres that I bought in this condition.
What should you do with this information?
I am in the process of collecting Master Sets of the ex series and had these listed as variants to collect but became skeptical of their existence due to their scarcity. After this discovery I am removing them from my errors list because I see no evidence there was a legitimate distribution. I would need to see video evidence of the card being pulled from a sealed booster pack to think otherwise. I see this as being in the same category as any physical alteration of a card in attempt to artificially increase desirability and I am just bringing it to light. I do not have any of the Rising Rivals Rotom or Hidden Legends Regis to try this on but I assume it functions the same way. I would love to hear the everyone’s thoughts on this.
Wow, that is an insane discovery and a very interesting post. This makes a lot of sense to me as I do (very rarely) see these errors but they are almost always in bad condition. Perhaps the degrading condition leads to the top holo layer peeling, and it is either manually removed or falls off over time.
I think it may be likely that there was some print run that was done without the top layer of shard holo foil, duplicating your results but without the manual removal. That being said, any legitimate copies of these errors may be overshadowed by the fact that any copy could be turned into an “error.”
Nice discovery. Its very possible that there are legitimate examples printed in the factory without the additional layer, but the fact that it can manually be removed means this ‘error’ is defunct
This is the kind of thing I love seeing on this website. I’ve had a few of those cards and none were ever in good shape, and I chalked it up to luck and figured I’d look for nicer copies of what I thought were errors later, but this makes so much sense. Thank you for doing the research and documenting and sharing!
Amazing discovery @youngbambino. Thanks a lot for sharing!
And even if there were legit Cosmos Holofoil misprints pulled from packs, it doesn’t matter too much if it can be altered like that. Reminds me of pulled vs aftermarket Square Cuts, or imprinted No Name errors in Yu-Gi-Oh. It’s easy to alter it yourself, so it will effect the value and legitimacy greatly, unless video evidence of pulling it from the pack is presented of a specific copy of the card (although it still doesn’t chance anything about all the other ones without such video evidence, which could be either: pulled misprint or altered/damaged card).
