I recently purchased a Japanese Latios gold star which had a darker and bluer print than others I’d seen online, and when I did some digging I actually found some variations across the blue-green spectrum.
A lot of the Japanese ones were closer to blue, though not exclusively, while non-Japanese ones were mostly faded or closer to green. Again, there were exceptions to this rule. I wasn’t able to find any information about this online, but I heard people on this forum are knowledgeable so I wanted to ask if anyone knew what’s going on here? From what I can tell, Latios is the only gold star that has such a big color discrepancy. Was it color corrected in later print runs to reflect its true green shiny form more accurately?
I’ll share a picture of my card vs a German version I found that’s the closest I could find to its shiny color. The difference is pretty noticeable, but like I said, it’s not solely a matter of Japanese vs non-Japanese. There are some overlaps.
You can find Jp. goldstars with lighter/deeper saturation. This is the case for both unlimited and first edition Clash of the Blue Sky set. With Rayquaza for example, the body is a darker color and the border is also noticeably darker. From what I can tell, neither is noticeably rarer.
Japanese and non-Japanese cards can also have adjustments to saturation and things like that. This may explain the Japanese leaning towards one color and non-Japanese towards another? With differences between print runs contributing to places where they might look more overlapped.
