I recently got this Japanese copy of Sprout Tower that seems to have either been printed on different card stock or had a different finish applied from normal cards. I’d love some more insight into what you guys think; how could this have happened & was this a factory error or caused by something else.
From what i can tell it seems legit. Nothing else stands out as odd, particularly as the back is completely normal and the print quality seems consistent with other cards. It also doesn’t seem that anything extra has been applied/ sprayed onto to the surface.
I found the card on Mercari JP, it was advertised to have a surface-processing error. The description suggested (translated) that the seller pulled this while opening a Gold, Silver, to a New World… pack, noticed the difference and sleeved it. The seller had high feedback and had multiple Pokemon card listings, so I thought i’d give it a shot.
Differences
This card is less glossy and reflective than the standard Neo era cards, it has a more satin finish.
The surface of the card feels far more coarse than the usual smooth card surfaces.
The colours also appear slightly more pale, though I don’t know if that would be a result of how the ink interacts with the card, or if it was just a lighter print run. Unlikely to be fading if we’re to believe the seller’s description, but who knows.
Here’s the full front of the card for reference
Comparisons with a normal Sprout Tower from Gold, Silver to a New World…
On the left are the pictures of this card, compared to a regular copy of the card on the right. I tried to recreate the same image using both cards.
Reflective differences
This kind of gives an idea of the texture of the card and you can see how much more visible the Bellsprout on the left is.
Does anyone have anymore info on this, or this kind of error in general. The listing suggests it was in a normal pack, so was it just a mistake that slipped though control, or something totally different.
Interesting! Very obvious colour difference.
Part of me was hoping there’d be some small text change and that one would be a corrected card that we don’t know about, but they look identical in that respect (sadly!).
I hadn’t even considered that, that would have been amazing. It’s a shame the pictures can’t get across the roughness of the surface as that’s the thing that’s surprised me most.
I had/have a bunch of neo bulk and have seen quite a few cards in this state. Can’t say how it happened, got the cards secondhand when I bought a collection. Holo cards can also be like this.
Thanks for the info, do you remember if they were all Neo Genesis?
Also that’s super interesting that this can happen to the holos as well; I assumed this was a result of the card stock they were printed onto but if there’s a foil layer, perhaps it’s the result of some treatment done to the card? I’d love to see one of those holos if you have any to hand.
Hey there, I’m extremely new to this hobby (just started around a few months ago), so I have no idea if what I’m talking about is just common knowledge or relevant to the phenomenon here.
I started with English cards, so I had an idea of what the cards felt like and the card stock, but recently, I had an order for some Japanese Southern Islands cards come in (all non-holos). This was the first time I had physically felt any Japanese cards, and I definitely noticed the cards felt different, but I just chalked this up to differences between the Japanese and English card stock/manufacturing process.
Then, yesterday, I had some Japanese Neo set holos come in. And after reading this thread and recalling that kind of coarsey/grainy feel you mentioned (which I just assumed was the normal Japanese card feel), I checked the surface and feel of my Neo holos (from Neo Genesis/Revelations/Destiny and Typhlosion/Feraligatr/Meganium from the Premium File), and they are definitely more glossy/smooth.
The two card fronts definitely feel very different, I think in the same way you describe, and were printed roughly around the same time (Neo: December, 1999 and Southern Islands: July, 1999), so maybe the same card stock/printing process that was used for the Southern Island promos had spilt over to some of the Neo Genesis prints?
Anyways, just adding what I know to help solve the mystery!
@bbobrob there may be some merit to that! Neo Genesis did have a second print run at some point to introduce corrections to various cards (see here and here). I have some of the rarer correction cards but I don’t have the original errors to compare them against, I’d be curious if anyone with the error and corrected versions could check the cardstock of these side-by-side.
I’m hoping they’re the same though - whilst it would be a nice niche variant I don’t especially want to have to try to track down a different cardstock Pichu!
I just followed your links and saw some other Neo Genesis-related threads, and I think it’s pretty neat that things like this are still just being found out/discovered!
If it turns out that an earlier print run had different card stock, I’m sure it’ll be a blast asking sellers to describe what their card feels like
I think those are different than the Japanese ones. I own all three Base Set Pikachu versions mentioned in that thread. Not the same copies as pictured in that thrad, but still all three version: matte; semi-glossy; and matte with semi-glossy card borders.
As for the Japanese cards, I remember having dealt with some Japanese cards that felt very rough to the touch, almost like a very fine grid of sand paper. Very different from most English or Japanese cards, including those three in the thread you’ve linked. I’m not sure if that’s the kind of finish Loch is referring to here with his Sprout Tower card, though. I also don’t know anymore which cards felt like that. I own over 12k non-duplicated cards and about 10k more duplicated, and more than halve of those are Japanese non-Holos… All I know is that the difference was very clearly noticeable to the touch, even though there wasn’t any visual difference on first glance. (I’ll see if I can find at least one when I have a bit of time later on by going through my duplicated bulk…)
@bbobrob Nice observation, I don’t have any JP Southern Islands cards but i’ll pick one up and do a side by side to see how they compare.
@quuador A very fine grit sand paper is a good description of how the Sprout Tower feels too. I’d be great to see to see some more, though sorting though 10k+ cards is
Small update: Picked up a Southern Islands card to test @bbobrob 's theory but am sad to report that they don’t seem to use the same stock from what I can tell.
The Southern Islands card is certainly not as smooth as a card from Gold, Silver, to a New World…, but is noticeably more smooth than the Sprout Tower. It seems to fall somewhere in-between the 2. The Southern Islands Lickitung I got was also slightly more reflective than the Sprout Tower. Here’s a picture of them side by side, but its hard to get much from it.
@dizzylochs The mystery remains then. Thanks for the update! Wish I could feel just how gritty that card is, but maybe it’ll have to wait until I get lucky and happen to pick up a similar card from the Japanese Neo set!
