Asking around again… Does anyone by chance have any information on the 1999-2000 USA Made Foreign Language Base set release? It seems to have been an extremely limited run, during a period where the Belgium manufacturing plant transitioned to manufacturing other sets than Base. They are short crimp and look like they are older but have the later 1999-2000 copyright date. I haven’t been able to determine if the cards are different.
So far I have found them in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, French languages.
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Did you try using the search option first?
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Based on their history i think they are the search option. But if you know something, link it. Id love to learn too.
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Dutch cards are all 1999-2000 copyright dates. I believe they are asking about booster pack variants. Easiest way to tell the difference is crimp size, look at the crimping in the portuguese pack in the link below vs the crimping in the photos they posted:
Here is a comparison of what they normally look like. They will have long crimps and look more modern, yet have an earlier copyright date. There must be some story behind it.
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Something interesting to me is that these must have been printed pretty late in the timeperiod of the belgium printing facility, and possibly deep into the neo era. The Neo Discovery packs printed there have the same long crimp seen in the earlier printings of base from belgium:
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I mean the opposite. The long crimps are the first ones released for all of the foreign languages except Korean/Chinese which are entirely separate because they come from the Australia manufacturing plant.
The long crimp ones come in copyright 1999 and 1999-2000, they came from the Belgium factory. At some point they needed USA to print a few more foreign language packs. At that time the copyright changes to 1999-2000 for all and the packs become short crimp. The artwork looks like the earliest version of English Base set, but is now showing up at a later time for foreign language packs.
For Spanish it ends up being the most common version of booster packs. There seem to be hundreds of booster boxes worth. The long crimp ones are more rare. Spanish was unique though and it had 2 versions of 1st edition and 2 versions of unlimited. No other language had that, not even English.
For all the rest (Portuguese, Italian, German, French) there seem to be maybe a handful of booster boxes in existence of the packs. I haven’t seen photos of any except the one I managed to purchase. The majority I have come across were distributed via the third-party clamshell multi-packs or Dollar Tree.
They made 4 entirely new pack maybe card variants and then printed almost none.
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Im not sure if itll help with your card sourcing but ive been trying to follow up on non-english decks the same way. There are some variants of portuguese and possibly spanish decks that were printed in both belgium and US. Currently trying to find examples of each as well as checking other languages but it is slow going with limited examples. Currently i know jungle has this variation and a strong possibility for base decks although i do need to review more boxes to confirm.
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I have formed a new hypothesis on where these may come from. Italian, German, and French versions may have only been found within the super rare Demo Gift Box handed out to certain vendors during 1999-2000. You can see the Italian short crimps here in a demo box that was opened on camera.
They may have never made it into a booster box at all, explaining why they are so rare. I would love to find out more from someone at WOTC.
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