Hey
I recently bought a Pokémon Sword & Shield: Evolving Skies booster box, and I paid quite a lot for it. I’m looking for some opinions from people who have experience with Pokémon TCG products, especially Evolving Skies.
I’ve already shown the box to several people with Pokémon/TCG experience, including people from Swedish Pokémon/TCG companies. So far, I’ve received mixed opinions, basically around 50/50, with some people thinking it looks legitimate and others having some doubts.
I’ve taken a lot of detailed pictures of the box, including the shrink wrap, seals, corners, crimps, printing and other details, which I’ll post below.
The box weighs approximately 829 grams sealed.
I would really appreciate it if some experienced collectors could take a close look at the pictures and give me their honest opinions.
Does anything about the box, wrapping, printing, or sealing stand out to you as unusual? Are there any specific details that you would check when authenticating an Evolving Skies booster box?
I’m not looking for anyone to make a definite conclusion based only on the pictures. I’d just like to get as many experienced opinions as possible and understand what details I should be looking at.
No expertise here, but I noticed the colors seem incorrect. Is it sun faded? The play online section on the front in particular should be as red as the trading card game rectangle.
Yeah, front of the box looks to be sunfaded a bit. The red “aura” around Rayquaza should be more red, especially on the left side. However, you can see it does get more red as you move from left to right, which likely means only the lower left part of the box got sunfaded. If it was a bad fake print the colors would be off everywhere, but they look fine to me.
Seems authentic to me all considering. Wrap looks fine, logos look good, nothing immediately sticks out as questionable. It is pretty hard to fake sealed boxes, and with everything you’ve shown I would be very surprised if it wasn’t completely authentic. Sunfading probably works in it’s favor, who would display a fake box for long enough for it to become a bit faded?
what madeyou first suspect it being fake? Help us understand what you are suspicious about.
Also, not to be too harsh, but why did you buy something if you were uncertain of its legitimacy for as much money as these are worth?
You should ask these questions before purchasing, and work with the seller to provide more images and information to you. Be careful out there!
I compared to my box, and it looks pretty much the same except the weird red fade of course. But if it’s sun faded, that explains it. IIRC its the red and magenta inks which fade first and most aggressively. Mine have been in boxes this whole time away from the sun though.
Wrap looks legit, but I’m not a seam pro. Though the wrap is so loose, I don’t see it being real wrap that was resealed. If it were, it would likely be a very taut wrap.
I can even confirm that the direction of the packs inside are facing the right way. Even the placement of the pack arts are identical to where mine are placed! Not that it’s likely anything more than coincidence.
It looks overall okay to me, but I’m far from a pro on sealed anything. I don’t buy boxes unless its a new set and I buy from stores, and usually I just open them right away.
Thanks for ur information and answer, tbh im most suspicious about the Play button/icon is abit orange and the most ive seen are perfect RED. I bought it from cardmarket, i saw an post on reddit an post like mines and some people were saying could be printing error so i dunno. Looks hard to know 100% without opening it i suppose.
I’ve seen similar things in factory packaging. Got some hardware components with hastily finished wrapping like this.
I actually have more confidence in this being legit because of this weird heat seal remnant. A scammer would not be in such a rush making thousands of these, and/or might want to cut it off because it’s an accident. Industrial accidents are good, for authenticity.
