Hey all, I’m looking at some listings for French torchics on eBay and I’m finding info that contradicts the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet says that for Emerald, French cards should have 2 codes for common with one being a repeat of the reverse code.
I’m staring at 4 eBay listings with different codes, suggesting that at least the French cards follow the English pattern (unless I’m missing something).
Reverse, 4NK (new user so can only post 3 links, easily searchable on eBay)
I assume you’re talking about the ‘Info Page’ of this spreadsheet:
And then the following text:
I think this is a typo, based on the texts at the Unsseen Forcess and Delta Species sections, and should have been “Uncommon - 2 codes; 2 for regular, 1 repeat (code 2) for reverse holo” instead.
You’re indeed correct that the Commons follow the English spreadsheet, but the Uncommons have one additional non-holo code that’s the same as the Reverse Holofoil in German/French/Italian/Portuguese, whereas in English it only has one code each for non-holo and Reverse Holofoil.
@tonysandlin Could you correct this in your Excel?
Yea, this is a typo. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll have to change it when I am at a computer. The reason I stated that one of the uncommon codes is a repeat of the RH and not the other way around is because the RH code is unique in most other instances.
@tonysandlin Since you made the new sheet of English Serial Codes …
There’s a user named “TokenGrad” that have told me this:
Perhaps you can help me with something here. So, there are two sheets in circulation for the serial codes. For the one attached to the older post on this subject on Elite Fourums, they stated that sometimes error cards weren’t printed with all the serial code variations. The cards in question are, Marill from EX Sandstorm, Gastly from EX FireRed & LeafGreen, and Magikarp from EX FireRed & LeafGreen.
On the newer sheet that you link here, I believe that the authors “worked out” the pattern of codes and did not specify anything for the error cards.
@tonysandlin Hi! First of all wanna say a huge thanks for the amazing spreadsheet you’ve made over the ex-era. Currently working on collecting the whole era and made my own copy of your sheet added with cards like theme deck exclusives and other cards additional to the sets. Made an account on here just to give heads up about a few typos/errors you’ve made. #1 In ex Deoxys the numbering is off. Magikarp (supposed to be #64) and Phanpy (supposed to be #69) wrong and have shifted all cards after them #2 In ex Sandstorm #101-109 are copied in from Ruby & Sapphire. They are not in the set. #3 Is a minor typo in the “Info Page” Where you wrote “Team Aqua Team Magma” instead of the set name “Team Magma vs Team Aqua”. “Holon Phantoms” is misstyped as Holon Phandoms. You also added a space in “LeafGreen” on the “Info Page”.
Hope it helps! Once again, huge thanks! Makes hunting Serial Code master sets so much easier
Thanks so much for helping find the mistakes! I have been quite busy and haven’t had time to really sit down and fix everything, but I plan to get in there and do that as soon as possible.
Also, I’m not the only one who worked on this so I can’t take credit! I listed everyone who contributed in the doc, so they should get some recognition as well. It was a team effort
And I would love to see a completed collection of this one day. I’m interested to see your progress!
Hi Dromanyte!
Can’t answer regarding Marill or common Magikarp. However, for gastly I know 100% they printed all codes on the common symbol, I own 3 of em and my friend the 4th, also own all codes on Uncommon error except ZTR. When it comes to Magikarp I own all 3 normal codes for the uncommon error (missing the reverse holo code).
A +1 thanks to all of those contributing data. I’ve become obsessed with these variants and now I am trying to add one of each to my personal collection.
Question: is there any data, for any given card if one of the codes ends up being more common or more rare?
I figure I can test this myself by sorting my personal collection and counting occurrences of codes. I wanted to ask if this had been tested yet before I begin sorting bulk (which will take me a long time).
Ruby and Sapphire Torchic 73/109:
5ZA-HMN-GF6: 4
5ZA-HMN-GF6 (no e-reader)*: 15
5ZA-HMN-B0P: 1
The Torchic with the e-reader variant from the battle decks is interesting but is making it hard to interpret the results. None of these are statistically significant because I haven’t counted enough cards yet, but it does make me think there is a rarity factor to the serials.
Can anecdotally confirm the Hoppip one, as I was just searching through Ebay listings a few days ago to finally finish my code variants. 40P > K3X > SQG in terms of how common they were in listings (and 40P seemed to be the most common by a large amount).
With all the enthusiasm I spent way too long last night sorting and did find statistical significance that one variant for each card is more common.
Ruby and Sapphire / Energy Search / 90
PLL-2GK-40P: 95 (93%)
PLL-2GK-SQG: 4
PLL-2GK-K3X: 3
FireRed and LeafGreen / Magnemite / 68
1KJ-GH7-40P: 69 (83%)
1KJ-GH7-SQG: 7
1KJ-GH7-K3X: 7
Hidden Legends / Staryu / 75
4D4-YFA-LPX: 88 (88%)
4D4-YFA-9G3: 6
4D4-YFA-0F6: 6
I counted a few others and they range from 80-95% frequency for the common variant.
Here are some more observations:
The original dataset of variants codes does contain some typos, O → 0, 8 → B, etc.
The common variant suffix (40P, LPX, etc) tends to be the common variant for all cards that contain this suffix (more below).
Cross-referencing my counting to eBay listing doesn’t yield the same result as there aren’t enough data points on eBay, you get closer to 50/60% in some cases.
One of my initial goals was to determine the common variant for each card, and I have a working hypothesis based on the above observation. If we look at all the cards that have multiple serials across these sets there are 564 cards (common and uncommon). If the pairs are stored and deduplicated there are 81 distinct pairs. Delta species is the only series that has cards with a unique pair.
For the instances of cards I’ve sorted, a given variant suffix that is most common will always be most common for the cards that also contain that suffix. This mostly matches the initial dataset and @eeveeteam’s data from eBay. There are some inconsistencies (~60) and I am picking a few of those to validate. My validation will be to sort about 100 cards of each of those and see if the pattern of matching common variant holds.
I plan to write this up and include some photos in a comprehensive post, but to conclude my research, my theory of rarities within serials has no real evidence.
Almost all of the commons I had been sorting and counting also appeared in theme decks. After watching many theme deck unboxing videos with high enough resolution to read serials, all evidence shows that every theme deck contains a single serial variant for a given card. Due to the amount of cards from theme decks, the numbers for those serial counts are not representative of any rarity indicator.
Given that finding, I selected some commons that do not appear in any theme deck (examples):
Ruby and Sapphire / Ralts / 66
Deoxys / Wurmple / 82
Unseen Forces / Chinchou / 52
Unseen Forces / Hoothoot / 59
For several of these I was able to count between 60-100 of each card and found the rate of the least common serial was between 25-30%.
I also watched about 10hrs of booster box unboxing and found instances where the same common’s three serial variants are opened. So a single box might contain all serials for a given card. I found this interesting as I wanted to see if various series corresponded to different printing time periods or other factors.
So my quest to find “the most common common variant” is coming to a close and I will simply consider the official scan to be the canonical version. This is for my cataloguing to properly label what are variations.
I am still fascinated by these codes and will try to test ideas here and there, but I’ll give up my focus for a while. One thing that would be really cool to document is an uncut sheet of commons and their serials. Unsure if any exist from this era?
Recently picked up complete Torchic and Treecko Korean Decks as well as a complete non-holo ADV set. Updated the Korean codes on the Japanese document for those as well as for the few others that I know that were empty. @rek88k also added their new Ralts line cards from the Mudkip deck
Still missing codes for some of the rarer holos in the Korean ADV set as well as the majority of the Mudkip deck.
I completed sorting through 1,400+ of these ex-era cards and the hypothesis I had about some serials being rarer than others holds. However, the rarity ratio is closer to 2:1:1 instead of 8:1:1. The 80%-skew counts for a single serial variant for several cards was due to that serial always being distributed in theme decks (but not exclusive to theme decks).
I wrote a blog post here: Pokémon Ex-generation serial variant rarity to go deeper into the sorting and analysis, and I managed to find a photo of each of the serials for my catalog.
Fun tidbit: the one that took me the longest to find was Camerupt #24 from Dragon, the 0PK version, and when I found one I added it to my personal collection.
So if you’re collecting, and finding it hard to locate a specific serial-variant, you are not alone. There is a scarcity factor to them but I am yet to figure out the meaning or reason: print-revisions, printing-facility, some unreleased game/accessory-related feature?
I’ll add a tidbit from my own collecting proclivities
I have many copies of the rarity error gastly from FR/LG and every copy has the code of N2L-DDG-DJ9. I think its probably just the most common code for it. Thought I’d at least share.
I only have 2 rev holo of magikarp FTQ-CSZDQG, but 2 isn’t much of a sample size.
The non-holo I magikarp I have 2 of, and one is FTQ-CSZ-60P and another that is FTQ-CSZ-23X
Good call, I left a note for myself to confirm the rarity-misprints and the serials seen in the wild. But then I never followed up on that, I will do that soon. I had been focusing on the Gastly and trying to obtain a real copy of each serial for each rarity, will do the same for Magikarp too.
