Japanese variant verification!

Hello! As some of you might know, I’m part of the TCG Collector team where we aim to have the most complete database of all of the cards and their variants. We’re currently doing some work on our Japanese database.

Our main process to confirm variants is a mixture of crosschecking with what we already have, official scans from the pokemon-card website and PSA pop reports of each set (since they denote errors, different holos and such).

Since the pokemon-card doesn’t have a per variant basis for cards (only their base variant as a scan), and the PSA pop reports have some questionable items, I thought I could create this thread for anyone willing to answer some questions and giving us a hand.

So to start this thread, a few initial questions came up:

  • In the SWSH promos section of our website, we have the images of the cards, most with the holos they have. I wasn’t able to find this section in the official japanese website. While inserting the correct holo pattern in each card, I noticed the case of Koko where it appears as non-holo. Since I personally own this card, I know it does in fact have a glossy holo pattern with stars (as shown here). After some research, I noticed every scanned card and some pictures taken in a certain angle, don’t have the pattern, even though it is there. Due to this discrepancy, trusting scans as become a bit difficult for me - does anyone know of more cases in the SWSH and SV-P promos where a scan doesn’t present the correct holo of a card? Since I lack most of these collections myself, I’m unable to verify if more of these cases exist…

  • PSA pop reports of Tag All Stars (sm12a), show some cards as being graded with some interesting holo patterns, such as Parasect-Holo and Grovyle-Holo, which shouldn’t have that holo pattern (or any pattern at all). Is someone aware of these variants existing? If yes, where do they come from? Could it be that the pop report is incorrect?

I appreciate any and all help on these and future questions. Thank you so much for your time!

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Just a general comment - PSA pop report isn’t perfect. There are some Japanese sets that never got an unlimited run like Sprial Force and Dark Rush, but PSA mislabeled a couple of 1st edition cards as unlimited. So their pop report shows that unlimited exists, but it doesn’t.

This could be the case in your example

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Haven’t gotten to those yet, doing it in reverse chronological order, but this information is very useful!

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This. I personally ran into a case where PSA Pop Report stated that there were 2 versions of 004/S-P Wooloo promo with one copyrighted in 2019 and the other 2020, while in fact all copies were from 2019.

It got on my nerves since I was going for all S-Ps so I collected the event details proving that 2020 copies shouldn’t exist and filed a CRC research request. (Pro tip: yes, you can use CRC research requests to ask them to review and correct their database.)

Turned out it was PSA mislabeling the years so they ended up merging 2020 data into 2019 and offered a free reholder to people with the 2020 label. Didn’t take the offer though since mine was submitted before the mislabeling and thus had the correct 2019 label.

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