Just to clarify, “poor quality” beta cards are not photocopies of “good quality” beta cards.
There are a lot of small differences on the priting artifacts, but the most obvious is on the Bulbasaur for example.
Here are the Bulbasaur beta cards in “good quality” and “poor quality” versions:
You can clearly see that the artworks are not at the same place, the framing is different, so “poor quality” beta cards are not photocopies of “good quality” beta cards, this is a fact. Moreover they are not just “the same cards printed on differents printers”.
I think this will be my last contribution since no one cares about those facts
These are absolutely intriguing details that I am enjoying learning about. Many times these kinds of details on official cards went undiscovered by most for years until someone put it out there. Please continue the discussion if it suits you as it is fascinating to read.
What do you mean?? I think these are great insights!
My thoughts on the photocopy were just something that came to mind, not something I seriously believe. You’ve demonstrated the hypothesis wrong which is great
It’s not that no one cares, I for one don’t have a way to explain the differences and don’t know what to think about these findings. I know nothing about printing and I assume 99% of people interested in these cards don’t either.
We need more information from the source. It’s an extremely important discrepancy between the two prints as these are both classified as the same thing when they clearly are not.
I have no idea what to make of this difference. But I’ll throw my thoughts at the wall anyway.
For the “good quality” card, the placement of Bulbasaur is shifted closer to the left side. The “poor quality” card has Bulbasaur better centered inside the frame. Someone was bothered by the centering and decided to fix it up? Perhaps even the Beta Playtest has variants of itself.
This is about where I land as well, Ive talked with a few people and have thought about this a lot over the last few hours. I still have no explanation or comment about printing defects, but maybe the prototyping of the cards themselves is more fluid than CGC has classified with these sets. Looking back to something like Shizzle’s post here there are still more variations and differences we haven’t seen yet.
I have remained pretty uninvolved in this discussion mostly just because these cards don’t appeal to me. But clearly there’s a lot of questions people still have!
Our boy @gemmintpokemon is hosting a live q&a in an hour so go ask him what you wanna know!
It was an interesting livestream, I believe he is sincere in his belief of these cards. He is auctioning off a quantity of these cards in batches over the next few weeks with the first batch ending tomorrow night. If I am understanding correctly, this means we can expect more batches being auctioned off over the next few weeks from this source alone.
He gave an estimate of an absolute maximum of around 20 total sets of each, but made clear this is only his opinion. For me, without further knowledge the supply is still a black box. We seem to have a fairly good idea of the amount Akabane holds, but not the other holders (the other creators etc that people seem to think also have copies). Also some other possibilities of wild cards like uncut sheets.
Also for the record, I don’t personally have a problem with how these have been released to the market. What is the alternative to selling them quickly in large quantities? Drip feeding them in tiny amounts over a long period of time to the market to extract as much money from buyers as possible? I can see why that would serve the sellers, but for the buyers this would surely be a bad thing? The only issues I have with how these have been handled is that we are missing some key details like supply and further context around the production process and who holds them, it makes it difficult for buyers to value what they do not understand fully. If the supply is much larger than presently understood, what we have seen on the market would not represent a dumping but rather the calm before the storm. Perhaps certain facts remaining unknown for now is the only option for various reasons, it just means that it is a bit of a gamble to buy them.
I agree that auctioning them isn’t paramount for issues but I feel like there was a missed opportunity for cool news stories, videos, content, etc. I really like these cards but they do feel a bit dumped.
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I’m also going to try to have my Scyther reslabbed because the case is scratched (and it doesn’t seem to buff out) and inside the penny sleeve it looks dirty and has small fibers/hairs… Hopefully this isn’t a long or difficult process.
Edit: Upon further polishing and review, I think the penny sleeve they used for my card was dirty and scratched to hell. I actually think my slab is clean… Now I need to find out if they will re-slab and penny sleeve my card. If not, I’ll just live with it.
Like @pfm alluded to, photocopying might also lead to its own artifacts, depending on the technology on the time. But regarding the printing, would laserjet printing be a “high-quality” printing type? (If some were printed via laserjet, it would probably be evident seeing the actual cards though) I don’t know anything about the adoption of laserjet technology for the office, but it seems like the technology existed at that point.
Regarding why some might be photocopies and not others (if we believe the identical artifacts to be a result of photocopying of a master copy), could that just be an organizational thing. I could see a situation where one employee might want to test the cards out or discuss with another employee but didn’t actually have access to the master file, so they just ended up photocopying their physical test card to quickly facilitate the interaction.
