Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024 [major update for alpha & beta playtest]

About the tracking dots

Most home and office printers add metadata to printed sheets in the form of very tiny yellow dots (sometimes called a machine identification code) that can’t be seen with the naked eye. The layout of the dots are different between printer brands and some don’t leave any at all. Information like serial number and sometime the print time is encoded in these dots. They can act as a “signature” for the printer that law enforcement uses as document forensic evidence (like in cases of forged currency).

To view the dots you need to a magnifying glass or high resolution image and you need to adjust the colour channels to emphasize the yellow. More info: How to Find Yellow Dots in Prototypes - DIY Guide

Important note:

The dots are printed on by the kind of printers you and I would buy. Things like magazines, posters, and real Pokemon cards will not have dots. They are printed by large industrial offset printers.

How to read the dots

Different brands use different dot encoding patterns, and not all of these can be decoded. The companies don’t reveal this information so any known pattern has been cracked by someone from the general public.

The most well known of these is was broken in 2005 and often referred to as the “Xerox DocuColor” code - named for the printer models used to discover it. Some brands other than Xerox also use this same pattern.

In this case, a 15x8 grid repeats like a checkerboard across the entire printed sheet. Each repeated grid has the same dots. The columns represent binary numbers For example, the eighth column encodes the year in binary. “2024” would appear as “011000” which is 24 in binary.

If you have a “Xerox DocuColor” style code, you can use @mika’s decoder implementation here to decode it: Yellow Dot Decoder - Fake Prototype Playtest Cards

Tracking dots on the “prototype” Pokemon cards

A slew of cards that were originally believed to be early prototype and cards used for playtesting have been appearing in public auctions starting in 2024. Most are believed to trace back to Takumi Akabane - someone who was involved in the early development of the TCG. He was also involved in the authentication of these cards. The combined sales across all auction websites likely exceeds $10M. Individual cards were selling between four to six figures, based on the variant and the popularity of the Pokemon.

Because these cards are printed from a home/office printer, many of them have tracking dots. And many have a dot pattern that suggest a print date in 2024.


Note the decoding result. We see this serial number reoccur across many cards.
image

Checking the dots can be done with public images if they are sufficiently high resolution. Such as this signed one from the “Takumi Akabane Collection” where the autograph was witnessed by CGC:


The dots reveal the 2024 year and the same printer serial number.

Variant breakdown

The development of the Pokemon TCG was an iterative process, and many prototype and playtest variants have surfaced. Based on evidence inherent in the cards, this is what I can put together to the best of my ability

Note: only Alpha playtest and Beta presentation have any documented evidence of their existence that predates 2024

Alpha prototypes

HQ: inconclusive.
LQ: could be a copy of HQ, when the copy was made is inconclusive.

Alpha prototypes

Update:

High quality back: dated to 1996 for the three starters
Alpha pattern only: speculated printer model code suggests it was manufactured around 2016 (print date unknown, but after 2016)
Double dot pattern: all observed copies so far have 2024 dots

Beta playtest

Update:

HQ beta: implicated lower bound of print date is 2016 based on the presence of alpha dots
LQ beta: all observed copies so far have 2024 dots

Delta playtest, Alpha presentation and “Gamma”

  • There are few of these graded but they all look similar to LQ beta and all observed and tested copies of all three variants have 2024 dots
  • No copies of Gamma have been graded. The “gamma” designation is being used here because that is how they were referred to from someone who sent me images of them. The art does not match any existing card. It’s unclear where they are supposed to fit in the timeline

Beta presentation

  • No hi-res scan available yet, but I see no evidence of dots so far
  • They match well with the corocoro images and the print quality suggests a different printer was used for these than anything mentioned so far
  • inconclusive so far

Image summary made by @BANKS

Acknowledgements

Thanks to @tediorso for suggesting this avenue of investigation.
Thanks to @mika @linkdu83 and @HumanForScale for helping with data collection and analysis
Thanks to @BANKS for working on information summary

211 Likes

Holy Shit

62 Likes

Are any of these 2024 prints raw or have they been “authenticated”?

1 Like

Incredible research.

What a dangerous game people are playing buying these, pkonno really DID have a printer in his basement.

27 Likes

Taking into consideration the personal stake that you have in these cards, you’re the goat

50 Likes

Does it have to be a scan or can you do this from a photo of a playtest? Does it have to have color?

1 Like

Another observation I want to mention.

The alpha prototypes were likely designed in a tool called ClarisWorks 4 which was available in 1995.

Here I emulated an old mac and ran it:

When looking at alpha prototypes there is clearly a set that is higher quality than the others. Consider Pikachu



Consider the dots in the background:


Also note the shared print artifact that goes through the “Pikachu” text.

It’s not limited to Pikachu.



46 Likes

Personally, I think it makes sense to go after the grading companies here

This is a disaster

They should be fully refunding people

49 Likes

I will lose thousands.

65 Likes

26 Likes

The tragic irony of pfm believing in these cards for months only to be the one to discover the truth behind them…

39 Likes

Proud of you @pfm. You didn’t have to release this and yet you did all the same. You solved one of the biggest mysteries this hobby has seen in years. If anyone was going to do it, it was going to be you.

78 Likes

I am stunned and impressed beyond words. Holy shit.

Does this mean they’re all fakes or just some of them?

9 Likes

That’s what separates Greek heroes from timmys, PFM went the distance

14 Likes

Great analysis as always pfm, amazing stuff

9 Likes

I think the most reasonable take is some are certainly not 1995/1996 playtest cards as we’ve been led to believe, and the rest are at least questionable.

13 Likes

I’m still digging into it. All I can say is that I’ve seen evidence of 3 different printers for the coloured variants and one of them has 2024 in the metadata (majority of the beta). The majority of the alpha have a different set of print dots.

for example:

I have a guess at the printer brand. I don’t believe print time is encoded but the printer model should be in there.

In other words:

  • High quality beta = no dots
  • Low quality beta = dots in the OP
  • Alpha playtest = dots above

This is my general observation, there are exceptions

25 Likes

Well there you go. I won’t speak in absolutes as it still seems like there is some information to come, but if this proves to reflect the entirety of the playtest cards it can’t be seen as anything other than an epic failure of CGC’s authentication practices.

This was the original problem with the cards, that we had to rely on “trust me bro” from CGC and Akabane, with none of the in-depth analysis that CGC is known for. Because they didn’t do it, pfm had to, and digs up very questionable results.

I am hard pressed to imagine a more disingenuous and exploitative process. It appears like these cards and their release were deliberately engineered to fool the community. CGC at best was negligent in their duty as a grading company, and at worst was complicit in the process.

69 Likes

Should I be impressed that you managed to do all this or should I be horrified that CGC didn’t have the means to catch this?

42 Likes

At times like these, I’m glad I’m risk adverse. I wanted to get some but there were too many unanswered questions.

24 Likes