Protostoise - putting the puzzle pieces together

[cataclysm80]

Pretty sure it’s simply because he’s done the work to track down these rare items, has the ability to cut them with a higher quality than most people, and is willing to do it.

Money is usually a motivator for sheet cutting, because you can unlock a lot of value by turning a sheet into cards.
A lot of people don’t buy sheets, because they take up a lot of space, and they’re expensive.
There’s more demand for individual cards, and they’re also more affordable than sheets, so the increased bidding competition pushes the value higher.
When you see a sheet sell on Heritage, divide the price by the number of cards on the sheet, and you’ll see the potential for profit.

There’s probably quite a few people willing to cut sheets, but there’s not many that can produce a quality comparable to a factory cut.
Most people cutting sheets will use tools from their local craft store, which works fine for cards going into binders, but often won’t pass the scrutiny of a grading company.
I’ve also seen sheets cut with scissors, and one sheet that was cut with pinking shears.
SB cuts inside a real print facility, and has the skill to produce good centering, so he’s able to produce a factory style cut and get the cards graded.
I’m not really into graded cards myself, but some people like them.

Those skills are useless unless you can also find interesting sheets to cut.
He can do that. Like me, he’s reached out to a variety of people who were involved back then, and that leads to discovering things.

So if it seems like he’s always involved in these types of things, it’s simply because he’s better at it than most other people.

[Nightvulture]

@cataclysm80

The Japanese made cards have slightly smaller dimensions

Am i thinking this card may be made in japan?

[mthursty]

@cataclysm80

Do the E reader codes work

I believe all E-reader codes on the FPO cards are japanese codes. I dont have a japanese e-reader or else I’d upload what that outputs. Currently my FPO charizard says “Region Error” while scanning it in an english e-reader.

[kamex]

Do you see differences in the yellow front border with a loupe? Fwiw, the prescence of the dot pattern in the yellow border is the easiest way I’ve found to tell apart the 1999 Japanese-printed CD promo Pikachus (lots of graded CD promos mislabeled as base set shadowless yellow cheeks out there…). Not sure if this is a Pikachu / if it applies here though

[Nightvulture]

It’s a Charmeleon, I also have a dewgong as well. Both of them are +15, on both sides I believe honestly it looks like it could’ve just been cut small, but I didn’t even realize that the standard size was different for cutting between the two.

[cataclysm80]

Laying flat on the desk is not the best way to compare card size.
Put both cards on their edge, vertical on the desk.
The edge against the desk (combined with gravity) ensures that the bottom edge is perfectly aligned on both cards, then you look at the top edge to see which card is taller (or shorter).

Then rotate both cards 90 degrees so that the side edge is on the desk, and you can compare card width.

It’s a small difference, but noticeable if you can get one edge of both cards aligned.
In this pic, the Pokémon card back is Japanese, and the yellow border is WotC.

[Nightvulture]

@cataclysm80

Laying flat on the desk is not the best way to compare card size.

Heres some better pics, def dont look japanese but im thinking they prob just had a specific printer cutting the wrong sizes.

[cataclysm80]

Hmm, that’s interesting.
Do you have a caliper, or something to precisely measure the height and width?

Is only the height off, and not the width?

[Nightvulture]

I wish i had better tools for this stuff.

Ill pull it out tn after work if i can, drop some more pics of the sides

[Nightvulture]

How are these?

[cataclysm80]

Nice job with those pictures.
They clearly illustrate that you have cards which are different sizes.

The next question is, whether you have cards that are larger than normal, or smaller than normal.
Not sure which card in your photos is the normal size of 63mm x 88 mm. (if any)

Then, What are the dimensions of the card that’s not normal size, and what is the explanation for it being a different size?
Do you have many that size? Where did they come from? etc.

[Nightvulture]

The charmeleon and dewgong are smaller size. Those are the only two i own as well. No idea where i got em. Cardstock is black core but seems ever so slightly different, not in a fake way

[cataclysm80]

The only smaller size Pokémon / Pocket Monster cards I’ve seen, were printed in Japan.
They’re approximately half a millimeter smaller in both dimensions.
The size difference can be seen in this image. Yellow border is normal size, and the Pokémon card back was printed in Japan.

The front side of this card from Japan, looks like this.

It’s a promo card which was inserted into the Japanese Hyper Corocoro comic book.
It showed Japanese Pocket Monster collectors what the new English Pokémon cards looked like.

The size of your two smaller cards, looks comparable to this card from Japan.
Comparing the dimensions of your cards to Japanese Pocket Monster cards of this era, is a good idea.
Perhaps your cards are also Japanese made promo / magazine insert cards, which aren’t documented well for some reason. If they look so much like normal English cards, people might have assumed they were the same and not documented them.
MTG had a variety of magazine inserts in the 1990’s, which looked identical to normal cards, but magazine inserts are always a separate print run for logistics reasons. It took some effort to document the card names of those MTG magazine inserts and the magazines they came from, because nobody cared to do it when they were originally released, since the cards looked normal.
A relatively small media insert print run from another country, might explain why you’ve only found two cards.
If this problem existed as part of a regular English print run, it seems like more examples of these smaller cards would be surfacing.

Cards on the uncut WotC sheets are intended to be 63mm x 88mm exactly.
There’s no space between the cards on the sheet, just the adjoining yellow border of cards.
Many sheets are 11 cards by 11 cards, or 10 cards by 11 cards.
If the slitter is adjusted to make all the cards smaller by half a mm, and the sheet is 10 cards wide, proper centering becomes impossible, because the total width of the 10 cards, is 5mm smaller than the spacing of the cards on the uncut sheet.
In other words, cards would become progressively more off center as the cut traveled across the sheet, and the far end of the sheet would have practically no yellow border visible on one edge of the card.
It would be VERY obvious to quality control that there was a problem, especially if each card was half a mm smaller in two dimensions.
To successfully make a whole sheet of cards half a mm smaller in two dimensions, you have to plan accordingly before the printing plates are created, to have the cards spaced properly on the uncut sheet.
Having special smaller printing plates, doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s possible to have a single row, or a single column off by half a mm, and if that row or column is at the sheet edge, maybe it wouldn’t be noticed.
Not being noticed, means that a bunch of cards could be produced.
If this happened in a row or column that wasn’t at the sheet edge, it would affect the centering of other cards on the sheet, but not their width, and that’s more noticeable as a problem.
Being accidentally off by half a mm in two dimensions, seems way less likely. It’s difficult for that to be an accident without someone noticing, because of how it affects the cutting on the rest of the sheet.

I don’t have any reason to think that your small cards were hand trimmed after they left the print facility, but I suppose that possibility is worth mentioning.
With MTG during 1993 to 1996, most people didn’t play with card sleeves, and sleeves weren’t tournament legal until October 1996. It wasn’t unheard of, for cheaters to trim their cards back then, so that it was easier to cut the deck to the good card after shuffling.
I don’t think that’s what’s going on with your cards, but it’s worth mentioning.

[Nightvulture]

Ill do some more research, that gives me someplace to look. It would take some serious effort and skill to make the cards look this good.

@packyman @OCDCompletist

any thoughts?

[Nightvulture]

@cataclysm80 for reference, this is a japanese dark wartortle between the charmeleon and a normal cut base unlimited psychic energy

[tidaldreams]

how about this one can u just chop this up send to cgc create 5 more copies then sell for 200k each

[cataclysm80]

A friend owns that row of 5 cards.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he had it cut into singles and graded, but that requires a very skilled person to cut it, and a proper facility to work in.
He’s not in any hurry to sell.
I posted all the sales above, so you can have a look at the price trend. At this point, I doubt we’ll see 200k per card anytime soon. I feel like there’s sellers who would be willing to accept less than 200k, but maybe I’m wrong. Time will tell. Market price is determined by the available supply and the interested buyers at that moment in time.

Thanks for getting us back on topic.

[tidaldreams]

u cant just use the

no idea if anyone can just send in these kinda stuff or u need to be a certain someone who chopped up all those disco cosmo double print test sheets

im guessing all the cgc prototurd stuff also pretty much collapsed the price of pretty much anything like this and other “test” prints🤔

[cataclysm80]

The owner of that row would NEVER consider using scissors.

Other people have used scissors, and also pinking shears, to cut sheets in the past, but this method produces very low quality results, so it’s a bad idea.

Anyone can submit cards to the grading companies, but I don’t know of any grading company that would accept offset press cards that had been cut with scissors.
The cards would just be rejected.
To get a card graded, the quality of the cut needs to be good enough that the grading company can’t tell that it wasn’t cut in the original factory.

The CGC scandal in early 2025, revolved around Pokémon Playtest Cards from Japan.
Near as I can tell, it was caused by one of the creators of Pokémon TCG being untrustworthy, and CGC not sufficiently double checking his statements with other Pokémon TCG creators.
There’s 3 ways to authenticate an item.

1. Witness the creation yourself. (trust yourself)
2. Talk with someone (preferably multiple people) who witnessed the creation. (trust an authority)
3. Compare the fine details of the suspect item to a known real item. This only works if you’ve established a suitable known real item for comparison, which usually requires using method 1 or 2.

CGC Signature Series autographs are a good example of method #1. CGC witnesses the autograph.

Usually it’s not practical for a grading company to witness the creation of a trading card, so they go to method #2 and interview the various people who were involved in creating it, because those people recognize their own workmanship.
This is the necessary method for authenticating rare cards that weren’t intended for public distribution.
For the regular cards that did have public distribution, it’s usually pretty safe to assume that cards personally opened from sealed product, are authentic, and are suitable for comparison to suspect cards using method #3.
This is how an authenticator builds a library / database of known real cards, which is essential for method #3

Method #3 is what’s typically used to authenticate regular cards. It only works if you have a suitable known real card to compare with.
With enough experience, you can memorize some of the known real details, but whether you’re using a physical card, a saved image, or your memory, it’s still a comparison.

The Pokémon Playtest scandal was unpleasant for everyone involved.
CGC (rightfully) took a big hit to their reputation, and their bank account.
But the CGC Authenticity Guarantee system worked more or less as intended.
Of the people who wanted to purchase Pokémon Playtest cards, the people who purchased CGC graded examples, are WAY better off than people who purchased raw examples.

But the Japanese Pokémon Playtest card scandal has practically nothing to do with these English WotC Test Prints that were graded years before.
Any collector who is seriously interested in extremely rare cards like these, should understand the big difference between Playtest cards and Test Prints.
Here’s a video for anyone who wants to learn more about the differences.
https://youtu.be/piQpaAKyPrM?si=qkU5EA28e7FJcPDj
I posted all the Blastoise Test Print sales data above, and you can see the price decline even before the public became aware of the Playtest scandal. I think the price decline is mostly related to how many “uncut” sheets have surfaced missing the bottom row, and fear that those missing cards might hit the market and hurt the value further.
It’s supply and demand. Fear of a flooded market, has hurt the demand, and it will take time for that fear to ease.
Eventually, someone will want to buy one of these Blastoise Test Prints, because it’s the first English Pokémon card, and the origin of all WotC Pokémon cards. That buyer will have to make a deal with one of the existing owners.

[tidaldreams]

guess it would depend on if the source of these sheets intentionally chopped off the bottom row coz otherwise it would be a pretty big coincidence that the sheets without the blastoise and full MTG backs are basically worthless (selling for 2-4k which is like <$50 a card ) and then u add in the blastoises and it becomes worth 6 figures

its hard to tell from the HA pictures if the sheets did have one (or more) rows at the bottom but they do seem to go right to the edge of the page and not have like a white or cmyb border at the bottom

even this one is a partial sheet and has borders on all sides except the bottom