Shadowless picachu

[quuador]

@frankr

The 1998 Picachu CD has a number of cards and one of them is a shadowless Picachu. Is that card the same as one from the shadowless base set?

It’s already mentioned above, but the only difference is the card stock. One can be found in English Shadowless booster packs (or Shadowless Theme Decks) and is printed on regular US card stock. The other is released in Japan in the Pokémon Song Best Collection CD promo set on Japanese paper, which is ever so slightly thinner. If you have a flashlight and both cards (or this CD Promo and any regular Base Set non-Holo card) and shine through both of them, you’ll clearly see the difference.

In addition, the CD promo is usually lighter in color, as you can also see in the pictures of my quote below.

To quote my Base Set variations article:

English Shadowless non-1st edition:

The same as the regular English Base Pikachu we’ve indicated as ‘template’, except for the Shadowless borders instead of borders with shadows around its artwork.

English Shadowless non-1st edition Yellow Cheeks from the Japanese CD Promo set:

As you may have noted, this one looks exactly the same as the previous card mentioned. In fact, these two cards are very hard to distinguish from one another.
This English card was released in a Japanese CD Promo set along with some other Japanese Cards. Because of that, it was printed on Japanese Pokémon Card paper/cardboard, which is ever so slightly thinner than the paper/cardboard used for English cards. If you shine through both of them with a flashlight, the Japanese CD Promo will let more light come through than the English printed one. In addition, the Japanese CD Promo is overall lighter in color.
The best way to ensure you bought the Japanese CD Promo card however, is to get it in it’s original seal. But in doubt the ‘flashlight test’ is a pretty good indication of which is which (if you have both of them to compare).

And yes, they’ll probably worth similar in price when graded. The Base Set version would be harder to grade, but I don’t think a lot of people know about these differences (and PSA doesn’t differentiate the versions anyway), so value-wise they’re very comparable.

Greetz,
Quuador