pichufan:
The conversation in the Giant Auction Thread has gone off-topic so I’m starting a more generic thread to ask the question: How did card distributions for Battle Road tournaments work?
I’m currently under the impression that for every champion card there are 2 to 4 ‘finalist’ cards, 4 to 8 ‘stage 4’ cards, 8 to 16 ‘stage 3’ cards and 32 to 64 participation cards.
Using the PCG-P set as an example, I’m lead to believe that for every Battle Road tournament held, there would be distribution numbers like:
3 Victory Orbs
6-12 Rainbow Energy 149/PCG-P cards
12-24 Championship Arena 116/PCG-P cards
24-48 stamped Pikachu 113/PCG-P cards
96-198 unstamped Pikachu 113/PCG-P cards
Of course there are then different venues (typically 8 or 9), so we can multiply those numbers by the number of venues hosting each tournament.
This assumes that the tournament structure was something like this, where an X represents a participant of a given age division at an individual venue:
However today @poke-geri left the following comment:
These „finalist“ cards how you call them have a much higher distribution number than you think. None of the new back promos are below 100 copies apart from the trophy (winner‘s) cards. No rainbow energy, no Burned Tower, no Cynthias feelings card has a distribution below 100 copies. Even the 2007 Mysterious Pearl has an estimated 300 copies in total and that is considered a trophy card.
…which has naturally thrown a bit of a spanner into the mix as this would derail my previous impression about how these cards were distributed.
Does anyone know how these Battle Road tournament card distributions actually worked?
You are aware of the fact that there were 160 2003/4 and 160 2005/6 Victory Orbs distributed? Sorry to destroy your dream but your rainbow energy is much more common than you thought.