I get it for the “leaked from factory” cards that can be a liability. But for something like this, its pointless.
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When you never sold one of your own copies, you would guess that it wasn’t about the money or maybe even the copyright. Maybe the owner was just very proud of their achievement and wanted to take their 100 cards to the grave. Which while weird should be their own decision.
Cant blame the winner for that sentiment.
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The winner doesn’t own anything except the 100 cards they were awarded. Which is by far the largest award given to an illustration contest winner. Even the actual artists like Arita don’t own their designs.
Pokemon owns the copyright. There are multiple winners who are overly entitled as if they own the copyright. The few winners who messaged PSA because they are butthurt the company that owns the copyright printed more than 100 cards are the definition of manchildren. They are definitely one of the contributing factors for why psa stopped grading the cards.
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I’m very much on the fence when it comes to extra copies. On one hand without them a lot of cards would be almost completely inaccessible to the vast majority of people if there weren’t any of them around, but on the other it feels very greed-driven that a company like Collector’s Cache is able to make itself the sole source of those extra copies.
I think it’s a bit late for PSA to decide to no longer grade these, but I do support the thought behind it. CGC’s decision to grade cards as “early release” (AKA “this was stolen but we don’t care lol”) has diminished their reputation as a grading company for me, and I can only imagine the same applies to those who have been directly affected by PSA grading these extra AA cards.
The 2010 Design Contest would like a word with you. 
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Haha they are finally getting the respect they deserve!
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There has got to be some middle ground between “we’ll grade anything and everything that comes through our doors even if we’re provided direct evidence the card in question is stolen property” and “we won’t touch anything that didn’t release via one narrow method…and you have to prove it was done the right way!”
I guess this means that 2x certs are actually more valuable now since that’s when “original” trophies were graded lol. All 4x and beyond trophies are worthless. Thank you PSA 
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New grail in sight.
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TPC’s fault for not doing what they should have done all along which is make the ACTUAL trophies physically distinguishable from the printerfodder/retirement grease.
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I recently had this graded. I provided them everything I had to prove I have obtained this copy from the actual winner but it’s nothing groundbreaking, nonetheless it was enough by the look of it. I suppose a little proof is better than none at all but they seem to be walking on a very very thin line with this approach.
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Interesting. Did they request this additional information before they graded the card?
No I had seen a picture of an Art Academy lot that wasn’t graded and I just decided to add whatever little proof I had. I also wanted to make sure word “winner” was on the label. Most likely I was just in the right hands at the right time but it might still be worth trying if you can prove the origin of the card.
I’m impressed PSA finally realised there’s enough space there to finish the word “CONTEST” on the label; all of mine are “CONTES”. 
Congratulations on the grade, the other cards Keita Mizuno has listed recently were all in pretty rough shape, so I think you may have picked up the best one.
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I just got off the phone with PSA. We spoke in length about their position on Art Academy. This was my interpretation/opinion on the call. Their current position is the procurement of the card matters in relation to authenticity. I explained the differences between extra copies of retail merchandise, extra copies of cards awarded for free, stolen vs gifted to employees. They still strongly consider how the card was released.
If it were possible to track the extra copies, that would potentially help ease the restriction. Perhaps compiling a thread similar to this one could help the situation. IMO a strong majority of the cards were sold from winners, and the extras are not the majority. Obviously the cases where winners haven’t sold are the easiest to track. Hopefully with more data PSA can ease the restriction.
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Physically distinguishable as in adding a post-production stamp like a prerelease stamp, either strictly to the copies awarded or strictly to the copies NOT awarded (regardless of how many times you fire up the printers).
A handful of winners have sold a lot of their cards, greatly offsetting the extras. I think the extras would be the majority if that wasn’t the case.
Take the Japanese Art Academy set for example. There are 10 cards of which PSA has graded 6, a cumulative total of 99 times. Of those 6 cards, 1 accounts for more than half of the grades. The average number of cards graded for the Japanese Art Academy competition is 9.9 per winner. For the non-Japanese set, there are 12 cards of which PSA has graded all 12 a cumulative total of 326 times. Of those 12, 3 account for just under half of the copies graded. The average for the non-Japanese set is 27 per winner, almost 3 times higher than that of the Japanese set which isn’t currently known to have had any extras leaked out.
If we take out those 4 cards with the most copies graded, the averages fall to 4.7 per winner for the Japanese set and 19.7 per winner for the non-Japanese set (I’m no mathematician so this may be an unfair thing to do, but I believe something like this is done in statistics to account for outliers).
If the Kyogre winner still has their full set of 100, we can use that as the baseline to determine how many extra copies of each card have so far been sold (especially when factoring in that the majority have originated from one seller who has graded the sets sequentially (e.g. certs 44870074 through 44870085 and 47171745 through 47171756)).
With PSA having so far graded 13 of Kyogre extras, we can assume each of the other cards in the set has at least 13 extra copies graded. This means that having factored out the heavy-hitters, the extra copies account for 13 of the 19.7 per winner figure for the non-Japanese set, or 66%.
66% certainly isn’t a strong majority, but it would put the copies from the winners in the minority.
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PSA has recently started to deactivate the serial numbers of Pikachu Illustrators. It may just be a coincidence but I am concerned they will attempt to “verify” provenance with the owners given this phone call. For example the PSA 9 pkonno sold serial 45563351 has been recently deactivated, and also some non pkonno ones. So I’m concerned they’ll use such a conveniently compiled list as a way to select which serials of Art Academies to deactivate.
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This is the message you get when you look up that serial:
The message is slightly unclear as it may just be PSA cracking down on the “proxy” PSA card makers who are using real serial numbers. But something like deactivating a serial in response to a couple very bad fakes doesn’t make sense…why don’t they just go after the producers of the fake cards?
If PSA is instead referring to the actual Pikachu Illustrator they graded as being a “known counterfeit”…that’s a worst-case scenario of their interpretation of “authenticity” to me.
It’s striking me how absurd it is for PSA to consider themselves the arbiter here. If Arita decides to grade a No 1 Trainer Pikachu, which he owns due to owning all cards he has illustrated (confirmed in an official interview published by Pokémon), would PSA decline it? Even if Pokémon’s “intended distribution” was "the winners, and also the original artist "?
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