So Australia has always been a mystery with little known detail other than the prints exist. We are aware of two different facilities that are named on the Uncut sheet site and from what we know, different inks were used on jungle and fossil red logo cards. The 4th print base cards have 2 separate variants of ink that each favor jungle or fossil variants.
This contact card references Nintendo for contact and not WOTC. Similarly the australian packs drop Nintendos icon from the pack. @packyman if you could drop a pic
Comparing Vileplume from Belgium and Australia, they share the same color of Pokemon Power as the Meganium from Neo Genesis helping show these were some of the final printings of 2000. Whats everyones thoughts and knowledge that can be added? Any insight to nintendo dropping the logo off their packs?
I feel like I can see a difference in the corner shapes. It’s subtle but once you train your eye it I think it becomes another visual metric for identification.
Basically corner rounding starts at/before the squared artwork edge, and the other the corner starts much closer to the edge of the card.
For me I see it as where the curvature of the corner begins. I put arrows to try and help pinpoint what I mean. On the left one, the curve starts beyond the square corner of the artwork, closer to the corner edge. The right one begins to the left of the square edge of the artwork and is more gradual. It’s similar to Apple changing the border radius on app icons.
The third from the left, what I think you are saying is Australia, looks closest to the last versions of Base set.
It’s a metric I have 95% confidence in for the unrecognized Base set cards. I have 10 different samples from 5 different foreign language print runs, and have also pulled cards from Belgium 1999 and USA 1999-2000 packs.
The machines do mess up periodically but once you see it, you don’t even have to check for the “e” error. I don’t have enough data though for anything beyond Base set runs.
