Feeling frustrated after a PSA Research Request (WOTC Promo)

General
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Hey everyone,

Last week @jakecollectskorean got in touch with PSA to see whether they have started grading more Korean-language cards, and he was told that they’ve started grading 2010 and onwards. This is amazing, but it leaves out the Korean ADV (Ruby & Sapphire) set from 2004 and the Mewtwo Blackstar 14 WOTC Korean promo. For reference, CGC already grades this card.

I’ve recently moved to Seoul, so on the back of Jake’s success I thought why not try my best to find as much information as possible about the Mewtwo release?! I did a bit of digging, and was able to find a lot of information about the release on local forums. The card was handed out at screenings for the Korean release of Mewtwo Strikes Back (12/23/2000) and had a print run of 300,000. I found a movie release poster with all of this information. The text on the bottom left explains the release and print run. It’s hard to read, but if you run it through Google Translate you can extract the text in Korean. There’s also more information on a Korean wiki here (translate the page and do a page-search for ‘promo’. It’s the second mention, which translates as Mew, but does in fact say Mewtwo in Korean)


And here’s the card which was handed out. It’s labelled 14, even though it was the only WOTC promo to come out in Korea. I think this was probably a mistake that happened during the translation.

I sent all of this information to PSA and they replied back saying that if the information was on Bulbapedia they’d consider grading the card, to which I replied that I’d be more than happy to incorporate all that information into the Bulbapedia wiki. PSA then replied with -

’We do need multiple sources to grade cards, and it depends on “the whole” of the information we can find. Right now, there is not enough information for us to grade the card, and if more becomes available in the future, we can revisit this decision.'

Does anyone else find this really ambiguous? It seems that they just want to see the official source (the poster) on various reputable websites, which I’m all for. But then they say there isn’t enough information available. Short of finding a WOTC employee who was around at the time, I don’t really know what else to find.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks,
Michael

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They’re just lazy or simply don’t give a duck.

I have been messaging them about foreign cards in the past and they were not even willing to grade cards which were on the official Pokémon website of the respective country.

Just don’t bother and go with cgc.

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PSA have graded cards based on misinformation in the past and I think they’re now a lot less willing to go along with what one person is saying than they were before - it’s very easy for them to grade something new but it’s very difficult to correct errors afterwards.

A big problem with Bulbapedia is a lack of citations and references - it’s a fantastic resource, but anyone can write anything they like without having to back up their claims.

As two examples: PSA attribute the 042/DPt-P Pichu card as being part of the 2009 Design Contest because for over 8 years Bulbapedia said it was (I have a blog all about it pichu.blog/042-dpt-p). A more extreme example is that PSA, Beckett and CGC all attribute the year 1999 to Japan’s Gold, Silver, to a New World (Neo Genesis) set even though the set was released in February 2000 - the incorrect 1999 date was noted on Bulbapedia for over 15 years!

Your best bet is to add a Bulbapedia entry and start spreading information about the card yourself - write a detailed post about what the card is and how it came to be, including as many images and sources as you can to back up what you’re saying, then go back to PSA after some discussion has been had.

You seem to be quite knowledgeable about this card - this is probably a long shot but I don’t suppose there’s any chance you know any information about how the 2010 005 DP promo Pichu was distributed?

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It took me three years of diligent work to get shadowless designated so I can sympathize;)

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Yeah, to be honest, it might just be the way I’m leaning. Still, I’ll spend some time this week doing a Bulbapedia page for the card and hope for the best. What cards were you trying to get graded?

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That’s really interesting. I can see how they’d want to be EXTRA careful, particularly with old releases. Thanks for the info! As for the Pichu promo, I don’t know, but I’ll find out for you! I’ll post back/message you when I know more.

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Thanks for chiming in, Gary! Looks like I might just have to be persistent then! :grin:

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I asked about getting the wotc promos of Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres to have them identified by the correct or incorrect artist version and along with saying there wasn’t enough info they even said they didn’t want to because they couldn’t notice a value difference which I consider a stupid reason that shouldn’t even matter.

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I had this changed a couple of weeks ago with the help of Cosetta from the set registry. I’ve been meaning to post on here to let everybody know. I did let tca and gemmintpokemon know when they give me the heads up that they’d recognised both variants and then again when they’d updated their systems.

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