-Galaxy holofoil: Also sometimes known as starfoil due to the appearance of stars. This foil pattern was the one used
for the english print run of base,jungle,Fossil and Legendary Collection
-Cosmos holofoil: No stars, more of a dotted,bubbled pattern. This foil pattern was the one that replaced the galaxy foil starting with base set 2 (Base 2 was the set after fossil), then Team Rocket, Gym Series, Neo Series,etc. Note that some foreign print runs used this cosmos foil as well.
It is interesting to note that the zapdos cosmos holofoil has the 1999 copyright rather than the typical 1999-2000 copyright which came from the Tempest/Thunderstorm themedecks.
Appearances:
-First Appearance seen in an error binder video (7:15) by TCA Gaming:
-Here is a listing containing a complete set courtesy of numismaticsgmc.
You might know this already but numismaticsgmc is from Washington state (-> WOTC headquarters) and he has told me in the past he has received from wotc employees.
It’s possible this was also from a wotc employee and was a test for using the cosmos holofoil as you mentioned.
Pretty sure this is numismatics youtube channel, anyway found this video recently where he just shows the cards and does a small talk on them. 31:00 minute mark
I saw several of these English Cosmos Holofoil Fossil cards in August 2023.
Pretty sure it was a full set, which would be about 15 cards.
They had just been purchased from an old WotC employee, so there’s one more set in circulation than was previously mentioned here.
They are Test Prints for the new holofoil pattern, the employee said so, and that’s why they’re only found from WotC employees.
If they were an accident (misprint), they would have been unknowingly distributed to random people inside sealed product.
There was a lot of other stuff with them, but I think I only photographed the Magic items.
Hello! Hope you still get my comment, I realise you wrote this nearly a year ago! You sound very confident that these were in fact a test print run. Where did you get this information from, if you don’t mind sharing?
It seems lots of people have confirmed that these are from WOTC employees but no further info until your comment (from what I can see).
A friend had just purchased them, along with several Magic The Gathering items, in Seattle where WotC is located, and was bringing them to CGC for grading.
I live in Florida, a couple hours away from CGC. We hung out the evening before he went to CGC, so that I could take a look at all the cool stuff he found in Seattle. I was mostly interested in the Magic stuff.
I shouldn’t share the WotC employee names for privacy reasons, but some of the Magic items came from one of the 5 WotC founders, and some of the Pokemon items came from the WotC lawyer who registered WotC copyright for all new creations with the Library of Congress.
The WotC employee they came from, said that they were test prints for the new holofoil pattern.
Test Prints are relatively rare. WotC prefers not to make test prints, because they’re expensive, and because WotC doesn’t make any money from them since they’re not part of a product sold to the public.
For example, a Test Print would never be made for something that could be determined by looking at an image on the computer screen.
But occasionally test prints are required because the computer screen doesn’t look the same as a real card.
This is often because of how ink opacity affects color, or because they’re experimenting with a different process, cardstock, or ink.
With holo cards in particular, how much holo can be seen, is affected by the reflectiveness of that holo pattern and the dot gain (ink density) of each ink color. The holo is only revealed between the ink dots.
It can also look different under different lighting conditions.
If the combination of these things isn’t correct, you could get a card that doesn’t look holo at all, or a card that has too much holo bleed, or a card that’s difficult to read because it’s so shiny.
Changing to a different holo pattern is something that they’ve run test prints for, but they wouldn’t make tests for reusing a holo pattern, so they don’t need tests for each set, they just do the test once.
When necessary, WotC requests test prints from the print facility. Then the print facility creates them, and returns them to WotC. The print facility is careful to do a good job, because the quality of these is seen by WotC, while the quality of regular cards is seen by the public.
At WotC, the Test Prints get reviewed by the appropriate people, and afterwards they’re useless, typically getting destroyed or kept as souvenirs. The WotC employee isn’t allowed to sell them or any WotC product at all, while they still work for WotC. They’re not even allowed to sell regular cards from their personal collection. But employees can trade amongst themselves, so stuff circulates a little.
