I saw some discussion earlier in this thread about Blastoise and unlimited. I do have a very saturated unlimited blastoise (bottom-right in this photo) - figured I’d share!
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sheesh that Turtle is BLUE
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That blastoise is DEEP in the water. Thanks for sharing
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Looking through my collection quick I can find obvious examples of the border being a different color. It is hard with the naked eye to distinguish different color saturations for me so I took scans of some examples of different border colors. Anything looking deeply saturated here? Do deeply saturated cards tend to have a more orange-ish border?
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So what exactly constitutes a Ruby Zard? Do the background and charizard itself both have to be darker? or only a darker background?
The red background will be extremely red in comparison to another copy, I feel like when you see it you’ll know.
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Thank you! Any chance you can reply to some examples show here so I get a good grasp of it? A lot of them in here a similar to me
Main thing that jumped out at me was the PokePower text colour on your Alakazams: left text looks noticeably more blue, while the right is purple.
Hello E4. It’s been a while!
Man, the secret’s out, huh? 
Who am I kidding? I can’t help but tell every collector I talk to about these beautiful cards.
The two most common and distinguishable variants of all 1st Edition/Shadowless Base holos are a more yellow bordered variant and a more orange bordered variant. See the left and center columns below. There are some yellows and oranges that are better or worse than others in the same category but more often than not your holos will fall into these two broader categories, both about as a common as the other. Then there’s a much less common run of cards with extreme saturation. They tend to have similar features suggesting they were printed around the same time/block/batch. We kind of dubbed the stand outs after gem stones: rubies, sapphires, and emeralds for Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur etc. It’s tough to know what’s what until you’ve seen multiples of these cards in hand side by side but the ones that are worth labeling as something different really stand out, particularly when you scan them with the same machine. Below you’ll see some average yellows and oranges next to some of my best examples of each.
I really like collecting these. It’s sort of like shiny hunting from the video games but in cardboard form and since they are actually pretty damn scarce, it makes them special. Just one more layer of depth when collecting Base Set. I’ve often thought of making holo stickers sort of how CAC does coins with their green sticker or how MBA does for PSA cards. For a ruby Charizard you’d have a red sticker, Blastoise a blue one, and so on. Of course doing this would only be for my own personal enjoyment otherwise I’d be making myself the authority on these which sounds like too much responsibility. Plus the cards speak for themselves.
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The deep color saturation is one of the things that eventually pulled me from English to Japanese cards. So seeing English cards with that deep, lush coloring is really inspiring.
There is such a vast gulf between the best thing and the next best thing. My heart always skips a beat, never fails.
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I was looking at one of my colorless base set holos in my binder and always thought it looked like it had more saturation than the others. Now I know why lol
Look at the PSA label saturation to be sure. Scans seem to change with all the grading companies