Could someone have made fake copies down the line, and Akabane just figured they were the originals? I find it very hard to believe someone from Creatures would knowingly take part in fraud, especially when Pokemon is incredibly protective of their IP.
I’ll stop theorizing after this since y’all are discussing real evidence. Great work!
Incredible discovery. Thanks for sharing this @pfm!
One question. What happens if the people responsible for these fakes had changed the date on their printer to the mid 90s? Are we lucky that they didn’t think of that, or would this still have been proof enough since the printer model didn’t even exist then? You mentioned one of the printers is from 2005. Do you know about the dot patterns that would be expected from a legitimate 1995 printer?
I just worry that the people responsible for this will refine their technique. It’s a never ending arms race against scammers and frauds in the hobby.
I feel like it was a blessing in disguise when I didnt win any of the auctions. But if anyone wants to sell one for under $150 I’ll gladly take something off your hands 
Wow incredible work @pfm
Can’t imagine the feeling when the pattern came back as 2024. This is the type of due diligence that makes E4 awesome
WOW! 
I didn’t know that color printers put metadata in the prints, this is really interesting/amazing.
This is unfortunately a very strong argument showing that the “bad quality” or “bad print” cards were printed in 2024, it’s terrible …
Concerning the “good quality” or “good print” cards (for prototype, alpha playtest, beta playtest), we know that Sean bought them at the beginning of 2024, before all the bad prints popped on the market.
If they don’t have metadata on them, that doesn’t exonerate them.
But we must keep in mind that they are not identical to the bad prints, there are differences in the position of the Pokémon, the alignment of the text, the inverted energies, etc. these are differences in substance, not in form.
So necessarily different files were used for printing them (whether at the time or today).
If good print cards printing was nowadays, why would these cards use a different file and a different print quality (in addition to a different printer, because of the lack metadata)? That’s strange.
Concerning the backs of good print cards, some backs are indeed clearly taken from the same image that was photocopied (we can indeed see the same fibers and dust in several places on different card backs). But this is not the case for all cards. I don’t really know what to think about it…
I have always (and still a little today, but much less than yesterday lol) believed in good print cards for different reasons, including:
Yes, I think it’s entirely possible that Akabane provided his blessing (and signature) to some cards that he believed were real, but were actually 2024 fakes.
The damning piece of this is that supposedly some of the fakes highlighted in the OP were from Akabane’s personal collection. If they were printed in 2024, how were they also part of his collection? Perhaps cards were removed and replaced surreptitiously, or perhaps Akabane knew that they were recently produced.
https://sales-history.fanaticscollect.com/items/PREMIER13649
Incredible insights! Thanks for sharing @pfm
the 2005 is the example provided by the EFF of how to interpret the year.
The dots are binary number. What it’s saying is that the binary number for “5” means the year would be “2005”
The only year I’ve seen on a card is 2024 so far.
Thank you very much for this.
I have to admit that I’m sad and disappointed.
Sad because I thought this would be an opportunity to own a piece of ptcg history. Disappointed because I trusted Akabane and CGC.
I ran out of likes big dawg. Maybe the E4 machine will give me some tomorrow.
Do you know where I could look at the good quality card scans?
I can assure you that most major auction houses will be aware of this tomorrow and will drop all their auctions immediately commensurate with US commercial code on selling forgeries.
Most assiduously avoid this sort of dubious legal situation.
Some great data here but this is hardly the end of this. There will need to be a response by CGC, who will inevitably shirk some responsibility for this as they did when I aired the Magic & Wizards issues. I don’t mean to sound biased but this seems hard to deny and I remain frustrated that they haven’t done anything to solve the problems they created in my own hobby.
My thoughts are - let the authenticator defend their decision here. Definitely leave the “community leaders” who oversold this alone. They may be defending their businesses from the very same authenticity issues you are. Additionally the authenticator may have important information to (finally) disclose.
The “good quality/print” cards from Sean are in these CGC submissions:
You can check the scans here: https://www.cgccards.com/certlookup/
There are not all the different cards for alpha/beta playtest cards, few can be seen in 2 other submissions (with one also including some beta bad print (?) with color background 14010369180xx) and the remaining is still missing (at least I don’t know where to find them).
I have been given a scan of a Delta Charmeleon:
I have also been given a scan of an alpha Clefairy Doll:
It has a complex dot pattern:
I suspect it could be two dot patterns in one print. When I overlay the dot pattern found on many other alpha cards (shown in white, slightly offset; example is here: Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024 - #18 by pfm) you get this:
When you overlay the serial number and year pattern from the OP you can see this:
My hypothesis is that an alpha Clefairy Doll was copied/scanned (picking up the alpha pattern) and then printed on the same printer as the examples from the OP and the Delta Charmeleon.
Props for another informative post!
Wow, Thanks for sharing your research @pfm! Noble & amazing work. I knew dropping that here would lead to some answers. Happy I could add even a fraction of new information to the wealth of knowledge that is this forum.
Disappointed but not surprised at the initial findings.
Based on what I’m reading this is insane. I seem to be missing a bit of context here though. When and how did these cards make their way into the collectors community?
Noticed that part too, only the cards directly from Akabane’s binder had that high quality back (meaning pika and zard from nido, as well as the gyarados from sean but that’s the only occurrence in all the cards he had).
Edit : Thank you so much pfm, you’ve done God’s work here! 
Finally someone has shone a light on what’s going on.
