I’m surprised nobody is talking about this, and I actually missed the memo when the article came out. I’ve been somewhat disappointed with PSA and how harsh they are with vintage cards. I’ve gotten into this variant due to you folks here at E4, so I wanted to get your thoughts on CGC starting to recognize these variants!
The article is now out.
Personally I’ve been waiting for CGC to recognize the others that PSA won’t, and I have some PSA “double holo error” cards and some of CGC’s “double” holo cards. I’m about to submit a whole bundle of them that I’ve been setting aside. I know there’s a lot of debate about it being a misnomer, but whatever you choose to call it it’s still a different variant.
I’m glad these are getting more widespread recognition, although it’s more expensive to collect as people look for them.
Here’s some of mine stored in the vault. I like how obvious the label is on PSA, but I appreciate CGC deep diving and sorting through the cards to recognize some of the harder cards to identify. (Delibird, legendary dogs)
In addition to the E4 guide Shockerb37 article about how to identify these variants, CGC has also taken side by side high resolution photos to help identify them.
If your card has been examined and determined to be the double holo, it will show up in the population report under “Variant 1”, shown here with my Shining Magikarp. The population report should reflect the variant instead of being lost in the sea (pun intended) of regular copies.
Most of the holos are not worth designating because they look almost identical to the normal variants. If it was my decision, I would only put the variant on Celebi, Crobat, Ho-Oh, Houndoom, Misdreavus, Shining Magikarp, Shining Gyarados.
As we all know, double holo is a misnomer. For how “scientific” CGC likes to come across to collectors with their in-depth study of card variants and printing processes, it shocks me that they would use a known misnomer. I get that the community recognizes this name, but it’s scientifically inaccurate.
I wish that they would have added the variant name by the Pokemon name rather than at the bottom of the label (e.g., Magneton “Double” Holo).
I regularly buy and sell these cards. From what I’ve seen, PSA has been unusually strict and CGC has been unusually lax in their grading of these variants.
Props to them for trying to recognize all holos in the set. We’ll see how accurate they can be with that as the cards come in; I’m expecting many mistakes.
There really isn’t a great name for the variant. It’s a different design on the opaque layer across the set; not sure how to make that concise for the label. Maybe you could call it Smaller Opaque Layer since it covers less area on the card? There’s a similarity to the opaque layer for their Japanese Neo counterparts (and some other languages), but might not be appropriate to call it exactly the same. Sticking with double holo is a safe play.
From my experience with Shining Gyarados, this “double holo” is the norm in foreign Neo Revelations (german, french, italian), they all look like that so there is no variant in those languages. In english I have had a hard time telling them apart, I think scans do more justice than irl cos it’s very subtle and hard to tell. Plus in the unlimited version the “flip a coin” error seems to be an indicator that it’s a double holo variant, tho not all double holos have that error, so there should be 3 variants of unlimited Shining Gyarados (regular, double holo coin error, double holo) and 2 variants of 1st ed Shining Gyarados (regular and double holo). This is still my theory as I haven’t seen enough copies yet. What? No one asked about Shining Gyarados in the thread? I don’t care.
This is kind of my thought and I’ve been trying to convey this but met with resistance. And you are correct, the other languages have this variant as standard. That’s how I’ve been able to identify it slightly, there are some versions where clouds are present but still faint.
