I don’t want to be reasonable and say fakes and stoke the fire, but it’s probably due to fakes already.
9 Likes
Apart from the people with direct contacts to Akabane, think about all the loose cards being sold privately via instagram. There will be a time lag for those to be graded and entered for sale. There also seems to be a certain amount of loose cards being sold on Mercari by Japanese sellers. How many of these cards exist and where are they?
Would be good to get an announcement from CGC on this.
7 Likes
Its possible that some of them were cracked for autographs. For example i don’t see any if the AU authentic grade stuff on there pop report. Maybe autograph cards dont show as well?
11 Likes
I don’t know if they include AU on the pop reports or if they do so consistently? I own a some other AU cards, which are real. But if you were to look at their full pop report there’s no mention of AU cards. 
6 Likes
So we can presume that any of these playtests/prototypes graded ‘au’ are not accounted for in the pop report? Not a bad way of keeping the numbers down.
6 Likes
Yes. For example, Chansey Beta Playtest (Thin Lines) has pop report of 2, which are shown to be 9.5 and 9. However, we can see there’s an AU.
8 Likes
Other than searching through the list manually and looking at the population of each card, is there a better way to keep tabs on the total population of “playtests” from CGC?
6 Likes
If I were sitting on a stack of say 100 of these and wanted to approach the sale of them in a rather ‘mercenary’ fashion I would grade them all ‘au’ and drip them into the market.
6 Likes
I don’t know. To be honest, I find it all baffling and probably confusing people further.
On the CGC registry both this AU and 9 are Chansey Beta Playtest (Thin Lines). But on the label one is “Colour Background” and the cards themselves have different illustrations.
I’m sure others are better informed than myself.
9 Likes
I think the descriptions such as beta etc are more a post hoc categorization than the original conception of these cards. I think over the last two years they have changed some of these descriptions too, so it is not so clean cut.
As noted here
even within the categories there are still variances among the cards.
8 Likes
Every time this gets bumped with new information I become more and more glad I didn’t try and pick one up. They just seem very iffy.
The hype bro’s will be working overtime till they can dump their copies.
12 Likes
I nearly won one at goldin auction a couple weeks back for a silly price. I feel blessed and protected from my own irrationality that I was outbid.
8 Likes
The colored background looks to be what we are now calling Delta Playtest. They are basically finalized and have all the energy symbols added. I’m not sure why CGC graded this with the wrong label. I agree it’s clearly not a beta card. I’ve also noticed that the Delta Playtest cards seem to be graded AU. I wonder if they are from a different collector who didn’t care for numbers.
7 Likes
I know there are so many question marks right now about these. Honest question - do you think we will get authenticity from multiple legit sources publicly and data about supply at some point? Cause if not, I just want to forget about these and move on. It’s dumb to keep getting worked up about them if this is all we’re gonna get.
6 Likes
Maybe once they have dumped enough of their bags that they are satisfied… Jokes aside, if the supply is larger than is perceived by the market there is no incentive for the insiders to reveal supply information whilst they are still looking to sell. In terms of details around variants, authenticity, manufacturing process (mounted on card when?) there can be similar incentives. But it does also seem that a lot of these details have genuinely just not been fully understood yet.
6 Likes
It’s a bit disheartening that the focus on all of this seems to skew toward the grading/pop/supply/price questions. Whereas I think the more interesting piece is the history and development timeline that can be established.
Would love to see more discussion on how the cards change each iteration.
For example, the first prototypes show different typing than what we ended up with
飛 = flying
虫 = bug
Normal/colorless starred off as just blank but had the symbol 無 = nothing in the beta iteration (a bit hard to see). The final TCG uses the star symbol but also uses 無色 = “nothing color” = colorless.
Just neat little quirks like this. The history is free!
33 Likes
They are very interesting historical items that give insights to the origins of the card game. In financial terms, the supply is one of the most important factors.
In other words, do the cards themselves make me starry-eyed to some extent? Yes. But should I bid with this sentiment?
6 Likes
I mean these cards were used in playtesting. (151 pokemon) x (up to 4 per deck) x (number of playtesters) x (number of iterations)
On the low end there is going to realistically be over 1000 copies of the playtests total. Whether Akabane kept them all for almost 30 years is unknown. Whether he still has any left is also unknown.
If I was interested in buying one, I would treat it like each playtest card was pop 5. Realistically, there are going to be multiple copies of each but also the ceiling is probably not too high.
12 Likes
I also cant rly see why someone would want to get something like this signed. A presumably very rare piece of history like this should just be preserved in its natural state. Itd be like getting an illustrator signed. Why mark such a rare, coveted item
14 Likes
Its a plausible notion that only a handful of each card exists, the pop reports seem to top out around that figure.
But, it was previously claimed only one of each of the prototypes existed.
And if there was say only 5 of each card, people sure are strangely eager to sell them.
One question is when they were mounted on card. If they were in the form of uncut sheets that have been recently stuck to card for an example, I feel this may make a large supply more likely. Not that being originally mounted to card precludes a large supply.
I feel like a lot of this is conflicting incentives from the holders and non holders. If the supply is small, why won’t the holders release information that indicates this (they have every incentive to provide evidence the supply is small). As someone with empty bags, I acknowledge an incentive for over-estimating the supply (or at least a lack of an incentive for under-estimating the supply). I feel the people that hold these cards have an incentive for under-estimating the supply. If you hold the cards I would be interested to know, but of course that is private information that nobody is owed.
Either way, without any statements from people with concrete knowledge on the matter it is an un known. For any prospective buyers, they have to weigh up for themselves how they will value the cards with these knowledge gaps in mind.
6 Likes