Most difficult card to authenticate? The mysterious case of Jumbo Shadow Lugia

[tval]

Is anyone here an original owner of a jumbo shadow lugia card? I am working on a write up to post for y’all on how to properly authenticate these given PSA has ‘authenticated’ known fakes which is just brutal for fans of the hobby.

there were 4 events this was released:

1. NYC premier October 2nd, 2005 - main release from 2-6pm
2. Houston march 25th, 2006 - second wave, more limited
3. E3 press conference May 9th, 2006 - super limited to a few press attendees (mostly adults who didn’t necessarily collect)
4. Platinum premier march 21, 2009 (literally 5 copies to break dance competition finalists)

I’ve already discussed in detail with an original owner who still has their copy from event #2 (houston) but I really want to find someone who was at the original NYC event in 2005 and still has their copy.

Whether it’s you, or you know someone, or you think you know someone who knows someone, if you could message me I have 5 simple questions that would go a very long way to my work to help give fans more certainty in the future and not get scammed.

There are fake ones being bought for several thousand dollars which is very unfortunate. I think this might be one of the least understood cards in the whole hobby and I presume that not a single person on earth has ever handled copies that came from all 4 events. I’m trying to understand whether the print runs between event #1 in NYC and event #2 in Houston differ at all.

[tval]

1. interestingly this PSA listing does not have the white speck above the second ‘e’ in ‘Developed’: https://www.psacard.com/cert/97883219/psa so is that fake?

2. and then this one does have it. So the 2 PSA listings differ: https://www.psacard.com/cert/71294672/psa

3. this PSA listing doesn’t even have the trademark logo on the back (the upside down one is missing): https://www.psacard.com/cert/135235558/psa

4. also here is a 2007 ebay listing photo where it’s missing the upside down trademark stamp: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/pokemon-shadow-lugia-jumbo-promo-card-e3-nintendo-79

[tval]

What I *thought* was the right approach to knowing you had a real one given many of the PSA copies differ greatly:

1. the ‘Gale of Darkness’ and ‘TM’ logo on the front of the card to the right just below the card art should be exceptionally crisp. not blurry in the slightest
2. To the left below the art the ‘BASIC’ text should be heavily bolded and have a dropshadow that is equally present behind all 5 letters. The ‘C’ dropshadow is the easiest to stare though because it’s not blocked by other letters
3. The name ‘Shadow Lugia’ should be black, bolded, and with no afterglow or white highlight fuzz around the letters
4. The card should not have a black thin layer along the edge like regular sized english cards to
5. The dimensions of the card should be “8 + 1/16th inches" long by “5.75 + 1/32nd inches” wide. Not 8x5.75
6. The shadow lugia itself should have an ever so slight barely-neon purple highlight around him, not red
7. The backside of the card should have 2 trademark ‘TM’ logos - both located below the ‘N’ in ‘Pokemon’ so one upside down and one rightside up
8. There should be a small white speck about the ‘e’ in ‘Developed’ at the bottom of the card near the copyright information
9. The card should not be super smooth to the touch and not be too flimsy length nor width wise. If the card is damaged heavily the length may feel a bit looser due to structural integrity loss but the card width isn’t so large that that should feel general sturdy and give some resistance and bend when you lightly press left-to-right
10. The ‘Not for Play Use’ on the back bottom should not be even slightly blurry. Also very crisp

However, for at least the visual tests, I have only seen 3 copies that match all of these:

1. Example 1: an original owner who obtained this card at event #2 in Houston at the space center event. I am chatting with this user now to try and obtain the specs above for the stuff I can’t visually look at. They also sent me a photo of the back and it looks fine

2. Example 2: another original owner who was at the Kennedy Space Center event in march of 2006. I have reached out but not heard back to try and obtain more photos and details

Example 3: An original scan of a card retrieved at Event #1, the NYC launch on October 2nd, 2005. I have reached out to both the member who had the card and the account that made the post which they post less than 24 hours after the event on OCtober 3rd, 2005. It can be found here.

Note that the giveaway of the card was never advertised and a surprise to everyone who showed up. Basically if you waited in line (~20-40 minutes) to play the demo of the game there was a 4 hour window from 2-6pm ET where every fan who demoed it was given the card. Many collectors were surprised because the email advertisement for the event included no mention of it as shown below:

* Purchase Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness and get a
free Official Pokémon XD Player’s Guide (while
supplies last)

* Play Pokémon XD and experience the extra dimension

* Demo Pokémon TCG: EX Unseen Forces and earn a FREE
booster pack

* Join in on Pokémon trivia, raffles, activities and
contests

* Come meet Pikachu and check out the custom Pikachu
cars – a great photo op

* Catch an episode from the new season – Pokémon:
Advanced Battle – airing Saturdays on Kids’ WB!

What: Pokémon XD Launch Celebration
When: Sunday, October 2nd, 2PM-6PM
Where: Nintendo World Store, 10 Rockefeller Plaza at
48th Street (Between 5th and 6th Avenues)

So the scan above is not from some email flyer or other ad. In fact it came from the PokeGym user TheDarkTwins having an ebay listing for the card the same day (the photobucket for it has since been wiped but the admin user PokePop posted what I assume is the photo still kept the repost there).

As for Events #3 (pre-E3 press conference that was super exclusive and mostly reporters) and Event #4 the 2009 award to the 5 breakdancing finalists they are so low print they aren’t really useful. There’s zero chance that every single listing that differs from the 3 photos above (which is basically all of them) are from events #3 and #4 and can just be written off as ‘a different print run’

[tval]

So now i’m a bit doubtful of my own card. It passed all the tests except test #8. Mine does not have the white speck in that spot similar to the first PSA listing i posted above. Mine is of course heavily damaged which I don’t really care about. I just care about authenticity

^missing white spec above the second ‘e’ in ‘Developed’ it looks more like it’s shifted over to the right and touching the top of the ‘l’ (L) in ‘Developed’ but also is fainter

[tval]

Here’s a close up scan of the edge of my card with 2 regular sized cards next to it so you can see both the regular cards have the thin black strip but my jumbo shadow lugia does not. I think this is normal though

[tval]

and some high resolution close ups of the 3-tone printer use on mine

[tval]

To be clear, this post is not about “this is the most difficult card to get a 10 in!” and it’s not about “is my card real or fake?”

I don’t believe there is a single person in the world that has held copies obtained at all 4 events. And I don’t believe there is anyone in this forum that can say with certainty whether jumbo cards are have different print runs, or if jumbo cards truly never have a thin black layer, or what their exact dimension is.

I say this because if PSA and BGS are messing up authentication of these it’s likely because they don’t even know, which means the strongest source we have is to crowd source data from fans who have one and see where things mismatch. modern jumbo cards are also completely different than vintage / ex-era. So we’d need to be pretty precise what our comparables would be. Some good ones are:

• Jumbo base set pikachu (english)
• Jumbo legendary birds trio (english)
• Not as good: jumbo japanese cards. I verified that my jumbo japanese corocoro cards dont have thin black strips but they are different enough that I don’t feel that told me anything major
• Jumbo Hoenn starters

As far as test that the community can do to contribute to this mystery of how to tell if a jumbo is 100% real or not:

• exact dimensions, like to the 1/32nd of an inch if possible. make sure your tape measure end point doesn’t elevate and change the measured distance. I just started at the 3 inch mark for safety. Also you can measure from the edge because the edge is rounded. you’ll need a reference line to ensure the inside measurement isn’t on a slight diagonal
• The white speck mystery: boils down to if 2004-2008 era cards were allowed to have deviations in their background patterns similar to how holo patterns differ or if every single one of them had to be perfectly copied.
• Check the edge for a thin black layer. naked eye should be able to see it

The hope iswe can build a story that gives fans a foolproof way to know theirs is real before they buy or know it’s real if they already have one in hand and prevent more scams in the future

[rtas]

Great topic tbh. The majority of copies (both graded by psa or raw) up on ebay right now give me fake vibes just based on the coloring /saturation on the back.

There’s a reddit post that compared an authentic vs fake copy but it seems we have to iron the details you point out to definitely say which is which.

[tval]

yes, I am in communication with that Redditor right now too. They weren’t able to answer all the questions above yet since their card is in storage so i have to wait a few weeks to hear more detailed info. their documentation was 8 years ago but the issue is that when i asked them how they knew there’s was real it was more just that ‘the other ones was clearly fake’. so could be a great fake vs a series of bad fakes (e.g. blurry text stamps)

[tval]

also, I looked of psychic cards from Unseen Forces as that set came out just before and I wanted to see if Psychic cards at that time held the same pattern

and then another member in the discord posted their lugia in response:

so, while the sample is only 2, there is something to be said about the ‘fingerprint’ of the ex era backgrounds having consistency (i.e. the white fog pattern appearing behind text in the lighter purple region and speckled white dots that appear in the darker purple region)

[crindy]

here’s a few more examples from my pc one holo and one not. sorry if this isn’t helpful!!

[tval]

it is! You see the white speck to the top right of the ‘o’ in ‘Nintendo’ at the bottom center of the card? the mystery here is whether that speckled pattern is exactly the same in terms of placement and tone/faintness on all copies of a given card. like is it a true ‘fingerprint’ or is it more like the varying holo patterns of vintage cards that could have swirls and stars in different places. the 3rd option is manufacturing deviations but i’d imagine those would be small. Both of yours match each other and match the 2 copies i showed above whichs hints towards consistency. It’s not necessarily a shadow lugia, but it’s data to a subplot here

[tval]

Another datapoint that would be interesting for Shadow Lugia holders to crowdsource is weight. My scale isn’t super precise. but at 10 grams i can at least say that my (potentially fake) copy is between 9.5-10.5 grams

[tval]

as far as ‘best comparables’ if you don’t have a jumbo shadow lugia but want to contribute would be:

1. Jumbo Winner Stamp Marshtomp, Grovyle, and Combusken. These came out 2 years prior. Harder to find but also valid would be the Winner Stamp jumbos for Metal Energy, Multi Energy, and Oran Berry which came out just one year earlier.
   
2. Older vintage english jumbo has 2 options: 1999 Pika and 2000 legendary bird trio. There’s also Best of Game jumbos but many are holographic so need to be cautious with things like black ink layer, weight, and feel comparisons

3. Newer jumbos that came out right after it may not be the same size since this is when they started doing collection boxes. but at this point im not sure if they were still comparable or when they made the switch to the new style with different dimensions, etc

[tval]

Additional datapoint that other collectors can use (and im not sure if this is expected or not with jumbo cards) is the print pattern difference on the borders. Below I look at the boundary point between the border itself and the rest of the card on both the front and back for 3 different cards:

Fossil Dragonite Non-Holo:

back pattern: switches from 3-tone to solid color

front pattern: switches from 3-tone to solid color

FRLG Bulbasaur common:

back pattern: switches from 3-tone to solid color

front pattern: interestingly maintains 3-tone pattern. So authentic cards either don’t have consistency or they switch depending on the set/era

Jumbo Shadow Lugia:

back pattern: interestingly maintains 3-tone pattern

front pattern: interestingly maintains 3-tone pattern

I’m not sure what jumbo “are supposed’“ to look like for this test. but it’s another datapoint that ideally can be crowdsourced soon so we can build a fuller picture of what guarantees authenticity vs counterfeit

[tval]

I also did the light test. Note that I placed the card in a cardboard amazon box of similar size (~1 inch margins) with my iphone laying below the card with the light on. I know this box environment can cause some light to reflect off the edges so it’s not perfect.

For taking the photo I used an ipad pro but I saw that the camera lens was manipulating the exposure / contrast to make the light insanely visible and completely unlike the nake eye. I switched to ‘panorama’ mode which turned off all these optimizations since some of them i couldn’t force off via settings and that caused the image to print exactly how i saw it in person to give everyone reading this more accuracy.

frontside facing down, light showing throw the bottom half of the card

backside facing down, light showing throw the top half of the card

backside facing down, light showing throw the bottom half of the card

frontside facing down, light showing throw the top half of the card

[tval]

Photos of exact measurements and how I measured precisely:

Length was 8 and 1/16th inches long. Width was 5 and 25/32nd inches wide (or 5.75 and then one additional 1/32nd tic mark)

[tval]

Some people with Shadow Lugia cards were DM-ing me asking what the rigidity should be. Again, I don’t know if the one I have is real or not because it’s missing that white speck as mentioned test #8 above but if you want a comparison I tried creating 2 easy tests that anyone should be able to do without fancy equipment:

Test 1: how well does the card rigidity fight gravity?

*Just place a standard BIC pen in an ETB and balance the card on it. While my copy is a damaged card, it still rested almost perfectly flat and didn’t bend at all on the end points

Test 2: how much does the card bend under a small stress load

*I placed 9 Destined Rivals code cards on the end of my shadow lugia and snapped a before and after photo and blended them with this tool to show the card bends ~0.7 inches.

So the photo above is actually 2 photos combined (you need to keep your phone stationary).

I placed it between 2 slabs on top (to hold the card down) and 2 slabs on bottom (to raise the card further up so that it was at eye level with my stationary phone camera). I placed my phone in another ETB cover that was 8 inches away from the ETB the Shadow Lugia rested on. For consistency I made the slabs and shadow lugia all flush with the back corner of the ETB and then I placed the 9 code cards centered width-wise and just inside the yellow border. I measured the thickness of the 4 slabs with the jumbo card in between them at 15/16 inches and then used this tool to measure that the top right corner of my lugia card (near the psychic energy symbol) bend downwards 0.7 inches.

[mamaciro]

Thanks for your analysis. Would you be able to take a look at this cert and let me know your thoughts? I just purchased it.

https://www.psacard.com/en-CA/cert/126913332/psa

[tval]

Ah I was eyeing that one. Reached out to the seller asking if they were the original owner of the card (e.g. they got it firsthand at one of the 4 events above) but i never heard back

From a pure visual test (I can’t look for 3-tone colors / middle ink layer unless I had it in person of course) it looks mostly good. There’s one test that it doesn’t pass which is actually the same problem mine faces: above the second ‘e’ in ‘Developed’ at the bottom of the card yours also doesn’t have a white speck. Yours is basically the same exact card I have in my own personal collection but mine is more damaged than yours.

All of the original owners who have responded to me have copies that have that white speck, so both your copy and mine suffer from that uncertainty. It doesn’t mean ours are definitely fake, but just means until we find someone who was an original owner and has a copy missing that white speck we won’t know with 100% certainty. You can read more above on the nuances of why this white speck is even worth considering as a proof of counterfeit vs just being attributed to random noise or printing errors.