Were those three confirmed to be real? I just want to make sure I understand what I am reading since its a post of a story that is also overlayed. If they are real, it would make more sense considering their grades.
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Let me be exhaustively clear here for everyone since weāve become professors in semantics.
The original comment from @gottaketchumall was that
I canāt believe that either grading company didnāt catch thisā¦
This isnāt a fair thing to say and I take some umbrage with this as someone who was part of discussions about whether to holder these - even if it was only to provide some points on my Magic & Wizards results, how I did the work, and how it could apply to the Pokemon prototypes. I did participate in some of this and know that PSA did, in fact, know that these were high risk, and that there was no reliable way to authenticate - nothing short of a very long winded and drawn out research paper that would likely require tons of funding and possibly be inconclusive. All of this was discussed.
With my Magic & Wizards paper mostly concluded, the idea of a similar work in Pokemon for these seemed daunting. I could not do it myself because 1. Pokemon isnāt my hobby and 2. because i didnt know enough and it took me a year to do much lighter work for a hobby I am far more familiar with. There were no candidates in the Pokemon hobby that I could recommend and Iāve never met people with a similar interest in data and academics. I am one of the only people in yugioh who do this sort of work.
So when we say āPSA didnāt catch this,ā yes I disagree entirely. They and I did not even think it was necessary given that at the surface level these were problematic. Their only source of authenticity was a guy who was an interested party - Akabane. They were his cards and he was authenticating them. XRF was not a viable way to authenticate and remains so. I did not believe that these could be authenticated with benchmarks because I knew no way to prove that any one was real which meant that I could not create any controls - which @pfm has now done.
It isnāt PSAās job to police this. Were they to authenticate these cards, then yes, you could say - I canāt believe they didnāt do a dot test. But why in Gods name would they want to touch these given the litany of issues that can be simply observed?
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Important to note that every single non-graded copy that turns up from this point on needs to be highly scrutinized and considered a potential forgery, even if all signs point to it being real. There are people who will use the info in this thread to make the most convincing fakes possible. If there is a will, there is a way, especially with this much money involved.
Ironically, the only cards we can probably deem real are those already graded by CGC that show all indications of being real (proper printer codes etc.). These fakes have ruined any potential future market for the few people who may still have ungraded authentic playtests.
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PFM posted here:
its been lost in the chaos of this thread haha
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They were real but only a small fraction of the overall population is.
But itās a pretty poor excuse to say there are āreal and fake copiesā when all of the beta playtest cards have been confirmed to be fake. CGCās credibility is finished theyāve caused millions of dollars in damages.
I used to rate CGC highly since their cases are the best on the market, but Iām done with them now. PSA is king 
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Ah ok thanks! There is so much to keep up with right now its wild! Nice to see a bright spot confirming they are real! Also really helps solidify the validity of the dot verification!
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CGC are finished. Even their grading quality has gone downhill fast. Thereās a Stanley Gibbons CGC PokĆ©mon auction in London this month and all of their CGC graded gold stars have surface scratches on them, would be lucky to get a PSA 8 imo.
When thereās big money involved people tend to lose common sense, esp when you have one of the original creators of PokĆ©mon telling you theyāre real lol.
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CGC is probably not finished. They have had a myriad of big issues over the years, but people continue to use them because they either get caught up in the hype machine created by people they give special treatment to, or are desperate for an alternative to PSA (which is a legit need).
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@pfm Thank you for your efforts!
For these 1995 alpha prototype cards, Iām confusedā¦ A lot of this discussion and analysis is focused on the 1996 alpha/beta cards. Do you have any thoughts on the validity of these 1995 alpha cards? I have the 10 dratini you referenced above. If you like, I can provide a highres scan
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All the beta playtest confirmed fake? No lol. Some of them are. Betas really existed so probably the real ones are out there.
There is still something we need to figure out, the high quality ones
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Anyone know how to check it without photoshop? I tried with GIMP and Krita but canāt find any dots.
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Same method as PS. Just need to make sure your image is 4K. CGC scans are too small to show the dots
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the blue label ones are real apparently, yeah
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This is an high quality one.
There is not yet a certainty of their authenticity, we still need to find a way to āproveā it.
I dont even need to look for dots, even tho it would be fair, we still need to find a hq with dots.
Hq and lq are much different
Also i just noticed the cert is 369. All the betas from that batch are hq and have smudge all over the card.
As Pfm also stated that we still need to find a second copy of any hq beta.
I have made my idea, hope we will find a way to prove this
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If you have a newer phone with a good camera and preferably a lightbox then you can take up close photos with your phoneās flash on and edit the photo in your built-in photo editor. These are my results so far. I have posted about this in the thread yesterday and this morning.
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Awesome work PFM, and everyone thatās contributing to this as a community! I had no idea about this kind of metadata before and itās fascinating to learn.
The method should definitely be applied to all of the other test prints and prototype cards that has surfaced previously, and I hope it can be reliably used as an additional method of authentication going forward. 
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ok thank you Iāll try that
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Photos were taken with the Raw Max feature enabled on an Iphone 15 Pro Max on 1x zoom.
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