Tbh, I don’t know for sure.
In 2015 the German winner mentioned the following information:
So we assumed his information is accurate, and there was no Italian deck for the 2001 tournament. We do however know there are Italian Pokémon VS cards:
So that only left the 2002 World Championship as option, for which we unfortunately have barely information as you already mentioned.
Here the three threads where most of this information is coming from:
TMB 2000/2001 vs-sets in other languages (May 2020 - June 2020): this is the thread the bottom picture above comes from; and we now also know the Swedish; Danish; and Dutch decks that were given out were all in English
VS English card list (July 2020): just an overview of the known pictures/scans of the VS cards that I’m aware of
Unfortunately we already know the information the German participant provided isn’t entirely correct, as the Portuguese, Danish and Swedish decks do not exist. I guess he was very young at the time, so he just mentioned some of the countries where the other kids were from, assuming they received decks in their native languages (which wasn’t the case as they received an English one).
I’ve found a Japanese website detailing some more information. I’ll post a screenshot with some auto translated text.
According to this link there was an Italian participant indeed. Also this source outlines the languages of the decks. Dutch isn’t mentioned so I guess we could cross that one out as well, which seems plausible.
I still wonder if the Italian, German and French decks were printed again in 2002 but that information is nowhere to be found
I remember smpratte talking about it on Patreon. He said something like (IIRC) “it’s not rare, but it’s the rarest Charizard.” So that leads me to believe that there are 1000+ copies, as otherwise it he would (assumedly) consider it ‘rare.’
Does anyone have information on the distribution of Stadium Challenge Metang 023? I’m curious how rare it is, and I think it very possibly might meet the <1000 copies criterion for inclusion in the document.
I’m personally a little reluctant to add any extra Battle Road data unless someone can chime in with a decent summary of how the Battle Road tournament stages actually worked. It’s hard to give a solid number on those cards as little documentation exists about the tournament structure.
A while back I updated the spreadsheet to mention the finalist React Energy and Rainbow Energy cards as having a distribution of “198?” along with the PCG-P Championship Arena as “288?”. These are the values I have personally concluded, but I could be very off with those.
If Championship Arena does have a distribution of 288 then the number of stamped Pikachu cards would depend on how many third stage battles needed winning before advancing to the fourth stage - if it was simply one win to advance, it could be said that the stamped Pikachu has a distribution of around 576 (288 x 2), however if it required more than one win to advance it would get more complicated for two reasons:
How many people won a third stage battle but did not progress to stage four?
Was a stamped Pikachu awarded for each third stage battle won (i.e. could individual participants be awarded multiple copies of the card)?
If it was a simple case of only needing to win one battle to progress then everything is dandy, but chances are it was probably a best of three - we’d then have to question whether the Pikachu was awarded to anyone who won a single battle or only to anyone who won the best of three. If it was on a per-battle basis, a result of 2-0 would result in one Pikachu being distributed to the winner (possibly 2 if the second point above is true) whereas 2-1 would result in both people being awarded copies of the card.
The same argument can be applied to the Championship Arena card as well - how many fourth stage victories were required to advance into the finals (stage 5)?
For the record, I have a thread asking about the structure of Battle Road tournament stages here: www.elitefourum.com/t/how-did-card-distributions-for-battle-road-tournaments-work/24911/1.
This card is certainly a candidate for a card which possibly has a distribution under 1,000, but I think we need more info before we can say that for certain.
Pretty much no information exists online from around the time of this card being distributed that I can find. What I can gather from web articles surfacing between 2005 and 2007 though is that it was from an event held at the San Diego Convention Centre in July 2004, which is conveniently the same location and same month San Diego’s Comic Con happened that year (over 3 days) with a then-record attendance of 95,000.
I have no idea what “Stadium Challenge” even was but if it was something that involved simply spending all of 2 minutes in some booth doing some simple task I can easily see this having a distribution nearer to 10,000 (if not more) - assuming it was from some event held at Comic Con, that is.
A distribution of 10,000 would be a bit surprising to me. It’s worth more than the 2004 WB creator cards, which each had a distribution of 5250. it’s also more difficult to find than those. So it feels like it’s less than 5k copies, but I might be wrong about that.
The Bulbapedia page makes it sound like “Stadium Challenge” was some sort of tournament. So that also implies that it would be more involved than simply spending 2 minutes in a booth. But you may very well be right. There has to be someone on this forum who played competitively back then who would know what this event was?
@zorloth I did some more digging this morning and uncovered a PokePedia article entitled “Pokemon Timeline”: www.pokepedia.net/timeline.php. This mentions 3 dates for 3 separate locations for these Stadium Challenge events which were unrelated to both San Diego and the Comic Con event:
July 10 South Stadium Challenge - Arlington, TX
Winners:
10-: Andrew K. (second place was Demetre F.)
11-14: Tyler Ninomura (second place was Aaron Curry)
15+: Denise Barlock (Crobyss) (second place was Robert Eguia)
July 17 East Coast Stadium Challenge, Rockville, MD
Winners:
10-: Kevin R. (second place was Geoffrey S.)
11-14: David A. (second place was Frank D.)
15+: Eric Craig (Shiftry) (second place was Chris Fulop)
July 17 West Stadium Challenge - Berkeley, CA
Winners:
10-: Rachael B. (second place was Reed W.)
11-14: Stuart B. (second place was Michael C.)
15+: Eric Virgen (second place was Chad H.)
The good news is that unless the West Coast Stadium Challenge saw over 750 participants then this card very much does belong on this list! I’m assuming the West Coast venue likely had around the same number of participants, so I think it’s safe to say the distribution will have been around 350.
I’ll update the spreadsheet later today - in the mean time if anyone can dig up the results for the West Coast Stadium Challenge before then please do let us know.
Good shout, I’d not heard of this card before.
Edit: I’ve updated the spreadsheet.
Edit 2: I’ve also updated Bulbapedia - it didn’t make sense not to.
Wow! Amazing work. You’re a much better sleuth than me haha. One consideration is that they didn’t know exactly how many people would show up to the events, so they definitely printed more copies than they distributed. I’m not sure if these copies would’ve entered circulation, though.
PCL should be included. You can hardly even find any raw copies these days, and it was distributed the same way Bebe’s Search was.
Relevant quotes from Bulbapedia.
PCL:
Bebe’s Search:
Bebe’s Search has a PSA pop of 10, and PCL has a pop of 50. The pop for both hardly increases these days.
So it is fair to assume that while Bebe’s Search is definitely more rare, PCL did in no way have more than 1000 copies distributed.
I think we should be very picky about what cards are added on this list otherwise it loses meaning. People will look to this list for guidance as an official source when buying cards. I think the only cards that should be included are cards that we know for sure have a pop less than 1000. The information needs to be accurate.
I’m not sure if you’re referring to the Metang, but I do think pichufan’s analysis shows that it almost certainly had under 1000 copies distributed. In order for it to have more than 1000 copies distributed, there would have to have been 750+ participants in the third Stadium Challenge event (which seems highly unlikely because the first two only had ~120 participants each). That and/or a number of extra copies would have to have entered circulation. But this is something that could theoretically be the case with any of the cards on the list.
Pop’s grow as cards increase in value. Pcl’s were only like $50-100 up until recently. Just because Bebe’s search only has a pop of 10 doesnt mean much either. But It’s worth researching how the side events worked and how many participants could have been involved and how many winners there could have been.
Also, this criteria for how bebe’s search was won has been updated since the last time I’ve read about it. It looks like bulbapedia was edited as early as October for this card.
“This page was last edited on 4 October 2020, at 16:59.”
Is there a way to see a trail of what was edited?
