Pokémon English Base Set (1999) - Master Misprint Error Guide
A 250+ photo guide for all the misprint errors in Base Set. Best view on PC. The goal was to include all the significant repeating ink misprints with at least 3 or more known copies. Thank you to everyone whos’ errors and photos contributed to this project! Hopefully this will be a useful resource for everyone to learn, collect, and find more errors! Please leave comments, suggestions, or questions below. Also be sure to check out the Jungle and Fossil lists! (Jungle List) (Fossil List)
~~Created July-September 2023. Collaboration between @misprintjeff and @JoshsOddCollection
“Grayscale Filler (1999) WotC-Style Borders” - Print Run Unknown (Sources claimed they found in booster packs from different print runs. 1st Ed., Shadowless, and Unlimited)
This article has been a work in progress between Jeff and I for the past 4 months approximately, on and off. Our goal is to have the most detailed Base Set error guide out there and we hope that you all enjoy it! There are a lot of errors that people already know about, and a lot of errors that are extremely rare and not well-known.
Jeff reached out to me and wanted to write an article together so we started making this and have been planning it in Discord for quite a while. This has been a tremendous effort, especially on Jeff’s part, so shout out to him for that. Jeff put most of this list together while I helped source photos and scans (I contributed a few errors but Jeff already had like 90%+ of them on his list). We hope you all enjoy it and look forward to seeing all of the errors that everyone finds in their collections!
Make sure to check all of your cards and see how many of these you happen to own! Cheers everyone, and as always, happy collecting!
Awesome to see all the photos. I don’t think I saw the yellow belly machop. I’m not sure what you guys deem significant but here are energies I have acquired over the years. The red lines were from several different sellers. I know base set energies are littered with printer hickies but I bought some psychic energies off a guy who had about 50
Thanks Shocker! And thanks for your help and contributions! You basically single handedly found all the Screen Holos besides the Machamps. I need to get photos of the best white ink smears you found as well since we just added that section.
I didn’t add the Yellow Belly Machop because I could only find one picture of it so it didn’t seem that significant yet. If you or anyone else has pictures of said “Yellow Belly Machop” please post it with a closeup.
Those red line errors are very cool, but i’d rather not bog down the list with energy errors for now because it’s already getting pretty long.
We added the Pikachu and a section for the missing holos, thanks for the reminder The rest of the errors don’t appear to be repeatable but if we find more instances of them then we’ll add them!
The Black Flame Ninetales is a print run variant and more of a design change than an error. I personally think CGC did a good job covering it in their article on it.
Btw, is this thread only for all English repeated Base Set misprints?
Since there are also Chinese Base Set cards with additional ink blocks printed in the artworks next to their artwork borders (highlighted in green in this photo). The Machop is the most known example of this, but the others are also all repeating misprints, which were duplicates I’ve bought from a Chinese collector back in 2019:
And of course there is also the Portuguese Wartortle, which doesn’t have a corrected version available and are all with Wartortle instead of Squirtle in the evolution box.
These are really crazy design errors! The article is for English though. I had only included the Portuguese Wartortle evolution error since it’s somewhat related to the same design error happening in English.
Yep, that is correct. I’m not knowledgeable enough with errors in the other languages and frankly I’m not really interested in them outside of Japanese
I added Blurry Double Prints and Jumbled Text Errors. It’ll be cool to track the variations with these weird ones. I also found the CGC scan of the Tape obstruction Venusaur to add to the bottom as an Honorable Mention. This list is getting pretty damn thorough I love it! Keep giving suggestions to make this better. Also just published the Jungle list today. On to the Fossil list now.
