Yahoo Japan in 2025 reminds me so much of eBay when I joined in 2001. Just a wild west of no protection and made up seller rules lol
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There have been a string of BGS trophies being sold by little no feedback sellers on Yahoo for the past few years. Many being no name trainers.
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These cards have been apearing on Yahoo for almost a decade. They pop up a few times a year at random. Most people either don’t want to take the risk or never catch them in time. Auctions always end in a 3 days w/ 48 hrs to pay. So they usually sell way below market because of the hassle.
There’s always been these random chance encounter deals on yahoo. Like the Japanese E series samples from early 2010s & the proto birds that Linkdu acquired.
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I feel these are less a random chance encounter, and very obviously employee extras as the 2000-2002 trophies are always no name, and they are all graded with bgs. They are also very frequently canceled when the seller doesn’t get a sale number they feel is high enough
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I agree, they’re likely ex employees. But I don’t think these guys care about sale prices. I’ve bid on some of these before & had my bids canceled. Then they sell cheaper than what I bid. Plus they could get much higher sales just using middlemen like Proretrox.
I call them “random chance encounters” because of the infrequency in which they appear. They only appear a few times a year on random dates & you never know what card they’re gonna sell.
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Are you bidding from a domestic account?
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No, I was using Zenmarket at the time.
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Thank you everyone for the thoughtful additions of information, such as reminding us of the rosette pattern, previous posts, and differences in printing methods. @HumanForScale 
Great work, continuing from PFMs thread and collating resources here.
My two cents: I’m sure many of us have dealt with cons. It’s often the case that those with greed and arrogant disregard are the most easily conned. Is that the case with CGC and Akabane? IDK. But we’re certainly seeing a lot of disregard in the responses to these recent card conflagrations. Evidence continues to mount.
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Glad you mentioned this. Magic fakes have beem easily exposed using them. I’ve been reading this thread over the past few days and maybe this eluded me:
Is there a definitive rosette pattern? Or at least subset of them, or rules that indicate a proper one?
I understand the lack of them indicates a different type of printer(not always malicious for true old protoypes[i think]) but am wondering if sophisticated fakes of other cards can be determine a by a ‘false rosette’(that phrase sounds like it’d get u killed in 40k)
I’m not concerned about any of my cards but I find it super interesting
@HumanForScale had some great info but I’m wondering if there’s any more specifics
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If someone knows better than me in these matters, please correct me. 
Rosette patterns indicate the type of printing method used. IDK if it’s always the same, but I imagine it’s fairly consistent, since the size and shape of the dots determines the saturation, colors, and shapes in the image. @GhezziTCG demo’d this in his post, tho I’m not sure I’m interpreting it right. Number 1 Trainer trophy printed on "uncut sheet" appears to have been printed in 2024 - #44 by GhezziTCG
Also, the crispness of the edges is critical for text and black lines, since it cannot be replicated without a vector image (scalable digital document) and separate printing layers, as @HumanForScale showed earlier.
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Interesting, thanks. I’ll have to do some further reading. As someone with a slightly above average of computer graphics and putting RGB pixels to pngs, CMYK and putting images on a magazine or playing card(for years at far finer resolution than screens, without today’s computer conveniences) is some black magic type stuff.
also the idea that colors can be printed but not accurately reproduced on a screen just doesn’t compute right with me. I get it, but also don’t.
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There’s a lot of BIG words in there. We’re not but humble collectors. 
kidding, mostly.
But it is odd, isn’t it, how images on paper don’t align with images on a screen. Scientists are quite clever.
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Quick update here now that @BenjaminBe has graciously sent some very high res scans.
Overall, I think my opinion still stands as the following on these sheets:
- They were printed using offset printing that is consistent with the printers used to print real cards from the same era
- They are clearly printed with original digital files via offset printing.
- Unfortunately offset printing does not leave any decipherable metadata dots like laser / inkjet printers so we don’t have anything to confirm dates like we do on the Playtest cards.
Some more details below:
- I got a 1600 DPI scan of a Snap Bulba from a friend whose copy is in a BGS slab.
- This means that the “real” copy looks a tad more blurry than the uncut sheet scans due to the additional slab plastic + inner sleeve BGS uses for its slabs.
First of all I superimposed a scan of the real Snap bulba on top of the sheet’s. From here you can see that rosette patterns have the same clustering and sizing. This means they were printed on similar equipment.
Next we check the black layer. The text and symbols should be clear, vector-based output without “feathering” from the rosettes. This indicates they were printed on a separate plate via offset printing and from a digital file. If this were a photocopy the rosettes would bleed into them.
This separation of CMYK plates is most evident in the Snap set symbol. Here is the real Snap vs. the uncut sheet’s
Real card
Uncut sheet
You can see that the uncut sheet has some alignment issues between the 4 plates. The black and yellow layers are misaligned and shifted slightly to the left & right, causing “pure” yellow to show on the left side’s white area and some of the white to extend beyond the camera icon on the right. This is also evident when we look at other symbols printed
Real Card
Uncut sheet
This is a good sign since it confirms that these aren’t just photocopies of actual Snap cards, but are direct prints from the digital printing files.
I’ve checked the other sheets and they all exhibit similar signs. Unfortunately I don’t have ultra-high res scans of other snaps or Fan club karps to compare to.
Again, nothing tells us when these were printed since offset prints don’t leave timestamp metadata that we know of. This just confirms how they were printed, and they were printed in a very similar, if not identical fashion to real cards.
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I do wonder whether people have started to sift through the gigaleak files and that’s why these are starting to come to market. My understanding is that some TCG artwork was included in the dump
From what I have seen, there is very limited TCG-related content in the leaks, and certainly no original card files. The focus was primarily on Pokémon video games. However, the overall style of the test sheets, in terms of how they are presented, is similar to other content in the leak.
The absence of TCG content in the leak is likely because the physical TCG is primarily handled by Creatures Inc., and the Gigaleak focused on Nintendo’s and Game Freak’s internal systems, which have less direct involvement in TCG development.
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