@pieterpie@hyruleguardian
I’d be also willing to learn more about Champion Road 2000 starter/fruits numbers. Difference between them and regular set cards is minimal but in one twisted way Johto trio were first gold star cards of this hobby.
I’m in the middle of writing a blog entry about the 2009 Design Contest and currently have 7 of the 13 magazines en route to the UK from Japan. I’m hoping they give more information.
You’re right that the official announcement on the Pokémon Japan website claimed that each winner would receive 100 copies of their design as a card, but they also claimed that the contest spanned 12 magazines and that each runner-up would receive their design as a jumbo card - not only was there a 13th magazine (Shōnen Sunday), but none of these jumbo cards are known to have ever surfaced and I’d speculate that they were not awarded. Furthermore when these cards appeared for sale they almost always appeared as full sets, not as individual cards.
I’ve made some charts for my blog post comparing the PSA population of the 2009 and 2010 contests and the 2015 Art Academy release, which in my mind paint a pretty compelling picture that each winner did not receive 100 of their own design and very likely also did not receive double figures of the full set like the 2010 contest:
2015 Art Academy - each winner received 100 of their winning designs
2010 Pokémon Card Design Contest - each winner received 100 of their winning designs
2009 Pokémon Card Design Contest - each winner supposedly received 100 of their winning designs
The 2015 Art Academy has staggered and non-uniform distribution of graded cards as would be expected from each winner only receiving their own design and nothing more. The 2009 and 2010 contests however have a uniform distribution (albeit a very small sample size for 2009) which is not in line with what would likely happen if each winner received only their own design.
I’m hoping the magazines I have coming from Japan paint a much better picture.
I’ve pre-emptively concluded my upcoming blog post with the following:
Yeah I think the forum actually automatically switches it to JP because I remember one time typing (it) just as an abbreviation without realizing that it’s also kinda a slur lol. I assume that happened to you in that comment.
I dont know a lot about these, but a while back I was checking where the tropical wind 2001 card came from. I came across the tyranitar half deck which distributed some vs cards in english and other languages. These should be incredibly rare and would be a nica add-on for this list. bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Tyranitar_Half_Deck_(TCG)
this card comes to mind
German Birthday Pikachu (I’m still trying to determine its origin, but I’ve heard multiple rumors it was a tournament promo with around 30 copies; definitely less than 1k though).
Japanese unlimited edition L1, L2, L3, World Champions Pack are all so extremely hard to find that I doubt any card is printed more than 250 times, let alone 1,000…
016/DPt-P Pikachu promo (not sure how many were printed, so might be slightly above the 1k threshold, although I doubt it - EDIT: Also already mentioned before by @pieterpie, along with the golden 20th anniversary Base Pikachu… I really should learn to read… )
I can name a few others I highly assume have less than 1k copies, like the German and Spanish Flying and Surfing Pikachu cards which I’m both still missing and have only seen once each, but I can’t say for sure how many copies were printed, and 1k seems a bit low for a regular promo.
I’ll see if I can find some more missing later on.
Greetz,
Quuador
Also, I do see the Champion stamped XY Double Colorless Energy in the list, but what about the TOP 8 stamped ones? According to this thread made by @thundermoo only 48 of each TOP 8 were printed.
And another stamped card that comes to mind is the COLLECTOR stamped Dragon Majesty Charizard. Roughly 400 copies were made. Although this isn’t an official release by TPCi, so I’m not sure if you want to add it?
I know someone else posted speculation on the quantity. But these were definitely distributed as full sets to the winners. There are few releases like this, but this one is particularly hard to find. Even when raw cards that aren’t mint are over $1k, the POP is still very low.
I added the Sample Set cards for now but I’m still holding off on the FPO cards. It’s a really gray line here with these cards, I don’t want to the list to go too deep into cards that never had an intentional distribution. I think it would do a disservice to a list like this to clog it with FPO cards.
I am open to reconsidering both adding FPO cards and I also may decide to remove the Sample Set cards I already added. We’ll see how the list develops.
Your link leads to the regular Japanese 1st Edition version. thymeee is referring to the English, Tropical Mega Battle version, which is indeed ultra-rare. So rare in fact, that the entire set of these cards - which date back to 2001 - only has 33 cards graded by PSA to this day.