Not sure how to post photos, but wanted to gather any additional information I can about these cards I recently have graded for a ex-WOTC employee. After many discussions with the owner and a variety of other old employees, I came to the conclusion that they were doing an alignment or color test. After posting, I was told that there was a lightning energy which first put the theory in mind that this was from a theme deck print. Moving forward, a couple more have been graded of different cards that ruined that theory. With the weird mixture of cards (energy, commons, rares, trainers) that have popped up, I am lost as to what test print or sheet this could have come from. I am personally 100% confident in the authenticity of these cards due to the provenance and research, but looking to share with eFour to see what other information we can bring out!
reminds me of https://archive.ph/pqEKq
I wonder if these are related test prints or if what I posted was just a oopsie print. It is cgc, so I don’t trust it being real or accurate.
Pokemon breeder was not released in any known decks in an era that would also include a base art pikachu. The closest thing is pokemon trader included in a base2 deck and trainer deck B. Because of that, they are not likely made from a sheet containing english decks.
I feel like these cards were made for collectors like me. Portal Three Kingdoms (P3K) is one of my favorite MTG sets. Incredible to see Deception and Zodiac Dog with a Base Set Pikachu and Pokemon Breeder on the back.
While I do not question the authenticity of these cards due to my own research and vetting of the original owner/story, but there is also the intentional creation of these cards for “fun” by WOTC employees. Pokemon Breeder printed on Zodiac Dog is convenient… Dog Breeder and Deception with Pikachu, Seems like they meant to do this for fun or to mess with us 25 years in the future.
Imagine if it was a Zodiac Dragon…
Is this one yours as well, @PokemonRadar?
No, I heard that once mine were public, someone else submitted 2 or 3. I know of a lightning energy, charmander, and i forget the other. no dupes yet tho.
No. This another ebay store I just launched.
@SolemnStar The card shown at the link you provided, is absolutely a real card, but it’s not a test print at all, and it’s also not directly related to the card PokemonRadar is asking about.
The card at your link went from a packout facility worker to Rusty at TCA.
There were 10 cards total, with 4 of them being Nidoran.
Rusty sold 8 of the cards to a friend of mine from Germany at Gen Con 2012.
My German friend has resold them to Magic misprint enthusiasts over the years, and some eventually made it back into the hands of Pokemon collectors.
Here’s a video with more info on them, and several other unrelated examples of Magic and Pokemon on the same card.
Please forgive my pronunciation on some of the Pokemon card names.
It’s not a good idea to label every unusual card that’s found as a Test Print, because they’re often not Test Prints.
Yes, the phrase “Test Print” sounds really cool, which might get people excited and willing to pay more money, but it’s important to be honest about what a card really is, and what role it played in the history of the game.
Here’s a video that explains the difference between Playtest Cards, Test Prints, Misprints, & Make Readies.
It’s a good idea for everyone involved with unusual cards, to familiarize themselves with these concepts. It helps you to recognize what you’re looking at, and also identify whether the person you’re listening to has any idea what they’re talking about, or if they’re just trying to hype something.
No, this suggestion can only come from a lack of understanding about the printing process, the number of people involved, and the associated costs.
If these cards are authentic, they’re definitely not “just made for fun by WotC employees”.
I’ll try to explain a little bit.
Very few people at WotC have access (or the know how) to adjust the print files.
Multiple other people proof read the stuff before it goes to the print facility.
Sure, mistakes can happen, but the whole point is to catch the mistakes before they cost a bunch of money.
This isn’t like a home printer. A WotC employee can’t conveniently print whatever they want while nobody is looking.
A WotC employee can’t print cards at all. WotC doesn’t own any print facilities, and WotC employees don’t really have access to the printing press except for special visits to the print facility by management.
At the time, in order to print a sheet of cards, you first had to burn color separation films. If I remember correctly, Pokemon is/was CMYK, with an extra Y spot color for the border, which is a different color of yellow than typically used for the Y printing plate. So there’s 5 color separation films, which are shipped to the print facility, where they’re used to create the 5 printing plates.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, because the machine which makes the color separations can’t output them large enough for a full sheet, so the color separations are done in quadrants. This means there’s 4 color separation quadrants for each of the 5 printing plates, which is 20 color separations per sheet printed.
Now multiply that by the number of different sheet layouts, common, uncommon, rare, theme decks, etc.
Once the printing plates have been burned/developed, they can be installed on the printing press, which is a really large piece of machinery that requires multiple people to operate.
It requires hours of labor for multiple people working together, to set up and calibrate the printing press. This process is called “Make Ready”.
One of the main goals of Make Ready, is to adjust the registration of each printing plate relative to the other printing plates. You might call this plate alignment in laymens terms, it makes sure the the printed image is in focus and not blurry.
During Make Ready, they have to keep feeding sheets into the press and using ink, knowing that all of these supplies used will just be thrown away as garbage, but it’s the only way to calibrate the press.
To reduce the amount of wasted supplies, they’ll often send these scrap sheets through the press multiple times, occasionally sending a clean sheet through to gauge their progress. These Make Ready scrap sheets are just going to be thrown away, so they can be anything, even stuff leftover from the previous print run, the last time they had to calibrate the press. Eventually the sheets get too ink saturated to send through the press again, but they try not to be wasteful, because sheets cost money.
Once the crew of people running the printing press thinks they have it properly calibrated, they take a nice example of the sheet they’re trying to print, to the boss for a Press Check.
If they’ve done a good job, the boss will sign off, and then that printing press can start regular production.
Once it’s ready to go and up to full speed, the press spits out about 3 sheets per second.
Hopefully now you can see that it’s extremely impractical for any person to casually print a card for fun.
If a WotC employee creates something for fun, it’s not going to resemble a regular card.
Very few people inside WotC (access to the files and ability to edit them) would be able to print something for fun to their office printer, but it will resemble something that’s homemade. They might glue it on top of a regular card, but it’s not going to fool any skilled authenticator, because the output of an office printer looks nothing like the output of an offset printing press.
On the other end of things, inside the print facility, goofing off is doing stuff like playing games with the cards during break, because they’re readily available, but even that is frowned on.
That’s useful info.
We should gather more data about the cards known to exist.
Perhaps they’re not all from the same sheet, even though they have some things in common.
I have access to some of the WotC print run data from the 90’s.
I can say that the lead time between when WotC placed the order with the print facility, and when each set was released, was about 3 months when these cards were made.
The Portal three Kingdoms Magic cards were released around May 1999, with a prerelease event on April 29th.
It was a relatively small print run, as the product was only released in the Asia / Pacific region of the world. English cards were for Australia & New Zealand.
But the printing happened at PBM Graphics in North Carolina, at least for some of it.
Since it was a small print run anyway, likely all of it was printed there, but I don’t yet have a way to confirm that other print facilities weren’t used.
With the 3 month lead time, WotC should have placed the order for Portal Three Kingdoms around the end of January or the beginning of February 1999, with the cards being printed sometime between then and the end of April, with enough time to ship the cards overseas before release.
So you’re probably looking for Pokemon products within that same window of time, or not long afterward if these sheets were laying around the facility as Make Ready scrap.
Base Set 2 seems pretty unlikely, but Trainer Deck B was March 1999 if it’s the one I’m thinking of with the red border backs.
It would be nice to know what Pokemon product these cards are related to, if any.
The biggest risk with double printed cards, is that somebody could have applied the second printing at home, so that’s always the first thing to look for.
Luckily PSA had nice enough images on their website, that after looking at them, I don’t think that’s much of a risk here.
They do seem to be made with an offset press, which doesn’t necesarily mean they’re authentic, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Additionally, since they’re square corner cards, and not normal cards, it’s not something that just anyone could make, even if they had a huge expensive printing press.
I don’t recall ever seeing any Portal Three Kingdoms sheets, so it’s unlikely anyone could just make some square corner cards.
35 square corner Traditional Chinese language Commons came out of Portal Three Kingdoms booster packs around 2002, and those are the only other square corner Portal Three Kingdoms cards I’ve heard of.
Reaching out to try and confirm whether they came from WotC employees, has been on my to do list since November, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m usually more focused on Magic.
These most strongly resemble Make Readies from calibrating the printing press.
The only problematic thing about them (some of them at least), is that they’re missing details which should be included on the same printing plate which created the details we can see.
For example, the cyan printing plate contains the cyan ink for the entire card, not just for the artwork. The artwork isn’t printed separately from the rest of the card, so why do we only see the art box?
Let’s see if I can figure out how to upload an image to this forum.
This similar card is the earliest example I’ve seen.
It surfaced in November 2018.
The owner claimed to be a mother, who had found her son’s childhood Pokemon collection in the house, and decided to sell the cards instead of giving them to him.
Quite a few collectors were frustrated by that revelation.
She had no idea where he’d acquired the card when he was 8 years old, but presumably from sealed product.
No connection to a WotC employee for this one.
A Magic collector ended up purchasing it, and they later submitted it to CGC in 2020.
It happened to be at CGC when I dropped off the Blastoise Test Prints for grading, so I was able to inspect this one, and have no doubt about the legitimacy of this one.
But I wouldn’t call it a test print. Double printing makes the details of both images harder to see, which would be terrible for a Test Print the company needs to base their decisions on. WotC would never seriously consider releasing two games double printed on the same card to the public, so this isn’t something they’d intentionally test and want to review for production decisions.
Labeling these as Test Prints, implies that it’s something WotC was seriously considering enough to invest in an expensive test for review, and that’s simply wrong.
Double printing does makes sense as either an accident, or as a Make Ready intended for destruction.
After that first card appeared in 2018, the next sighting seems to be Jeremy Padawer posting the Pikachu card on Instagram in 2020.
I didn’t see that myself, but Quuador mentioned it.
Then it appeared again in this Reddit post during 2022.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonTCG/comments/vift4n/misprint_base_set_pikachu_on_a_mtg_card_info_in/
People started asking me about these when they appeared on Reddit.
PSA graded them in 2024, and provided decent images if anybody wants to look for themselves.
Pikachu
Trainer
Once they were graded, people started asking me about them again.
I reached out to the WotC typesetter who created all the early Pokemon cards.
He did all the WotC Pokemon cards before Jungle by himself, and after Jungle he was training another person to handle all the international Pokemon typesetting.
Here’s what he had to say about these cards.
“Uh. Interesting. And confusing.
I have no idea. There was a lot of “tests” done for Pokemon, but I can’t recall putting that art in that way on a press.
I see no value in the art as a test. Feels like a makeready.
Pikachu is yellow cheeks and shadowless. May have been some very early prints for color? But that would have included more art, like the backgrounds.”
That’s basically the same conclusion I’d come to when I first looked at these cards.
I already knew that Pokemon & Portal Three Kingdoms were both printed at PBM Graphics in North Carolina, so I’m not too surprised to see them together.
Next I reached out to a friend who worked at PBM Graphics back then, printing various cards for WotC.
Here’s what he had to say.
“I believe this could be real. But I’d need to see it in person, or high quality scans. My inclination towards this is based on personal witness of similar things at PBM. Art separation is not unheard of. The problem here is that we’re only getting glimpses of portions of the sheet (or sheets). There are many things that suggest this is real, and some things are raising questions. Some of these questions are addressable (at least for me). The short of it, is that I’d need to investigate more, but am optimistic about it.”
He goes on to say that he suspects it would be from a scrap sheet, and isn’t supposed to leave the print facility, so we might not be getting the whole story from whoever managed to get it out of the facility.
If these cards came from a WotC employee, that last sentence is of no concern.
WotC paid for the print run, so even the scrap is theirs if they want it.
It’s nice when people save stuff, gives us collectors something interesting to talk about. Sometimes the person who saves it doesn’t necessarily know what they have, it can just be a cool looking curiosity that was going to be thrown away. If the person who saved it while visiting the print facility, then gave it to someone else back at the WotC office, the owner might not know exactly what they have.
Thanks for contributing, Tavis! It’s great to see you on e4.
For those who are unfamiliar - Tavis King is a foremost authority on MTG history, printing errors, authentication, etc. Definitely a wealth of knowledge.
Thanks Dyl
I created an account here years ago to share info on the Blastoise Test Prints, but unfortunately the original post I was going to comment on had been locked.
On a few other occasions I’ve intended to post here, but just never got around to it.
Always busy working on something.
Thanks for sharing / the insights @cataclysm80 !
Pikachu is yellow cheeks and shadowless. May have been some very early prints for color?
Sorry for the tangent, but this really interesting comment you shared from your contact intrigued me… one mystery to me has always been if shadowless yellow cheeks Pikachus were printed prior to red cheeks (before being changed back to yellow when shadows were added).
That comment seems to imply yellow may have been used first… Given the partial E_ITION trap seemed to be “fixed/removed” in red cheeks and the early demo packs & theme decks contained yellow cheeks, I’ve wondered if that could be the case…
I realize I could be reading way too much into that comment :), but if they happen to remember anything about the order it would be really interesting to some folks here!