Shadowless vs First Edition Base

General
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This is my favorite thread by far!
Such an abundance of information!
Great work E4

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I just open this thread because it hit three pages.

All this info below comes from Ex-WOTC employees/production manager/people that were in the know in the past. Because of this there’s no ‘listed source’ you can find this. It’s pretty much just info that’s been shared and is common knowlege to the right people.

There were 8 print runs of Base set they break down as the following:

1st print run - Shadowless/1st ed thick/1st ed thin
-WOTC prints out a bunch of ‘shadowless’ cards, they send out a set number to get 1st ed thick stamps on them. Later, according to the prodution manager, they realize they didn’t have the correct number of cards to fit product. It was said to be holograpic cards that they didn’t have enough of, so it’s unclear exactly how thin stamp non holos exist. WOTC sends more sheets to get thin stamps. The pressure was changed in the stamping machine, this is what causes the difference in the stamp. The remaining unstamped sheets were used as the first intended unlimited print.

2nd-7th print run - Unlimited
-WOTC makes asthetic and corrections to the printing plates and produces unlimited product. The previous unlimited collectors later named shadowless.

8th print - 1999-2000
-The final print was made after the new year causing the copywrite date to change, vulpix’s HP is also corrected.

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43

Here’s what I’m curious about. When someone says one print run, what does that actually mean numbers wise? There’s clearly multiple variations of card stock used with Shadowless because you can observe the color differences so when someone says one print run, the only info that really gives us is the ratio of Shadowless to Unlimited and the ratio is only accurate if every print run was the same number of cards being manufactured which seems unlikely if you are a business printing to demand.

I have a fragmented memory of seeing Shadowless cards and thinking they were fake when I was younger. I could only imagine the number of cards that were discarded or trashed because people thought they were some flea market knock offs.

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A print run simply means WOTC placed a purchase order for some cards. While companies usually have a minimum run size. When I was in the printing business, for a product like Pokemon (rares, uncommons, commons and energies in different poportions and printed on different sheets), a typical minimum of 1,000 rare sheets needed to be produced. A scaled up number of uncommon, common, and energy sheets would then be calculated.

The above number is a minimum. The maximum would be as much as you wanted. WOTC was known to tie up pieces of print equipment for months with their more popular Magic sets. I don’t know whether this was accomplished by a series of orders or one large order.

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@cullers @jkanly

You guys seem to have a lot of helpful insight into early printing. Any clue how the Red & Yellow cheeks Pikachu made it’s way through both 1st edition and shadowless print runs if there was only 1 printing of shadowless cards? It’s one of those cards that always confuses me as I would not expect it to be found in both sets (and as an E3 promo as well).

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The same reason ghost stamp Pikachu can only be found in yellow cheeks. Yellow cheeks Pikachu is found in theme decks, while red cheeks is found in booster packs. Different printing plates for different packages.

E3 Pikachu I don’t know. The stamp is placed after, so it’s entirely possible that they choose the Pikachu’s to get stamped from a pile that had already produced with both artworks/an actual choice they made to have two versions/an accident that they made a new printing sheet with both arts. I have no clue though.

Edit: Thought about it a bit more. Yellow checks actually can be pulled from a booster. It’s just that red can’t be pulled through a theme deck. Which would mean the uncut booster sheet would have to have multiple pikachus on it, red and yellow on a single sheet. Which makes it easier to explain E3.

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The % of Red and Yellow cheeks are exactly the same between Shadowless and 1st Ed. sets.

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You need to remember how cards were produced by the Carta Mundi / WOTC alliance. Carta Mundi utilized sheets that contained 121 cards (11 x 11). I seem to remember that the cards in the starter decks were random except the Machamp.

If starter decks were like theme decks, which were usually 60 card decks, they would print all the cards (rares, uncommon, common and energy) for 2 complete decks on the same single print sheet. That sheet would also contain some sort of filler card on it. It would look just like the pokemon sheet I recently described here: www.elitefourum.com/t/a-pokemon-collectible-you-may-have-never-seen/19096/1 The only modification would involve holo rares, which would be printed separately on a large holo rare sheet and would need to be added later.

But if starter decks had random cards pulled from regular production, then it meant pulling cards from the holo rare sheets, the regular rare sheets, the uncommon sheets, the common sheets and the energy sheets. Since base set didn’t have 121 different cards of any rarity, this means that there were multiple copies of each card on a sheet (think back to the Fossil holo rare sheets given away in the Kay-B-toy promotion). What happened was that one or more copies of the original red-cheek artwork were not replaced by the yellow-cheek artwork when the base set common sheets were initially printed. At some subsequent point the artwork was changed so that in later printings only the yellow-cheek variation was printed. If the first printing had equal red cheek and yellow cheek counts, then there were probably 2 copies of each (4 pikachus total) on the common sheet. You would expect either 3 or 4 copies of every common to get 32 different common cards onto a 121 card sheet.

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@cullers @hammr7 @garyis2000

Thanks for the replies. Based on what @quuador recently posted here in regards to red vs yellow cheeks it would be assumed that the variant was a correction some point in production. I suppose designers could have overlooked the change and put 2 of each version of the card on a sheet. Seems odd but possible. I suspect one way to find out more concretely is if you can find both Yellow and Red cheek variants in a single booster box. If so then they’d have to be on the same sheet, if not then not likely…

Edit: after watching a couple booster box openings it does appear that you can get yellow and red in the same box, but doesn’t happen all of the time.

If what Gary stated is true where it is a close 50% of yellow vs red cheeks you have to take into account that Zap starter decks (and associated sheets) would have swayed this number considerably in favor of the yellow cheeks variant. Just another variable to consider.

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I can recall seeing both yellow and red cheeks being pulled from the same box, possibly gemmintpokemons opening?

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I also remember seeing it and I do believe it was gemmint’s openings

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You are correct!

Yellow Cheeks:

Red Cheeks:

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