First editions or shadowless with stamps?

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Ok, I had some free time haha and the Shadowless Machamp question kept bothering me. Namely, what is the pattern for Shadowless Machamp and what variations are there?

TLDR, I think there 3:

This comes from looking at a bunch of sold shadowless Machamps on Fanatics Collect (lol) which will often have enough resolution to determine +/- 15 backs:

“Smaller” D Thick stamp and -15 back:

“Normal” D Thick stamp and +15 back (these also tend to have less thick "1"s, probably due to pressure differences as others previously determined):

Thin stamp and +15 back:

Sometimes it’s a bit of a judgement call on what is thick vs thin (but I feel like it still ends up usually being pretty clear), but I haven’t found a case that doesn’t fall into these 3 buckets so far.

Ok, now, bear with me…, but I think the potentially even more interesting conclusion here (to me) is that thick stamp shadowless holos should potentially always exhibit a “smaller/skinnier” D stamp (in addition to having -15 backs) (just like the shadowless Machamps we’ve seen above w/ -15 backs). Given that they all were likely stamped and cut from the same sheet. The non-Machamp thick stamp shadowless holos I’ve seen so far (from Fanatics or otherwise) all support this hypothesis.

For non-holo shadowless cards, it looks like there are both smaller and normal-size "D"s in the stamps (although it’s sometimes difficult to tell because of the frequent misaligned “3D effect”). For example:

So some non-holo shadowless thick stamps seem to match up with the “Normal D Thick stamp and +15 back” shadowless Machamps. This makes sense! They all have +15 backs so Shadowless Machamps printed with +15 backs should share similar looking stamps with at least some of the non-holo shadowless cards given their shared printer(s).

Putting my speculation hat on, in addition to adding more datapoints supporting the +/-15 theory and categorizing shadowless machamps, this shows to me that non-holo thick stamps probably have some slight noticeable variations by printer. I think at least for the +15 back shadowless printer(s), stamp pressure may have been dialed-in in phases (or on diff. machines) given all the slight stamp thickness variations we see in how thin or thick the “D” is. And by the time more shadowless machamps were called for… it looks like they were all made with “thick stamps” of the variety with “Normal” Ds. And then after that (Or maybe before??), the switch was made to thin stamps…

If you made it through that - thanks haha. Would be interested in counterexamples or support to any of the above!

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