Several weeks ago I purchased a rusted vintage tin that contained a variety of English and French cards ranging from Base through Gym Heroes in addition to 38 silver W stamped Dark Charmeleon Kraft promo cards. Another thing that stood out were 3 square cut Jungle Aquali (French Vaporeon) holo cards.
The main question I have is if there is any definitive information on whether the silver W stamped Dark Charmeleon Kraft promo card was an intentional test print/variant that was never released vs. an error caused by certain ink colors running out? Another question is how did the original owner obtain this many W stamped Dark Charmeleon cards let alone all of them happening to be the silver stamp variant.
Knowing the rarity of this card, my assumption is that the original owner may have worked at the facility that was printing/stamping the cards and maybe after discovering that a batch had incorrect colored stamps instead of the intended gold they flagged them to be disposed of but the worker decided to take some home. This of course is all speculation. Any insight or thoughts would be appreciated since there’s very minimal information about this specific variant. I would like to get CGC or other grading companies to recognize the silver stamp as a known variant but know that some users on here have tried with no success. Maybe this discovery will help designate the silver stamp as a true variant.
Another note is that per KantoHustle’s post here, these are the silver-ish variant that still have a slight gold color to it but leans heavily on the silver end (unlike the pure silver of the other variant). Thanks again for the few I messaged prior to this post!
Amazing find! I volunteer to take one off your hands so more people can hassle cgc about their legitimacy. But really, such a cool find and its so crazy to think about so many found all at once. I hope someone out there can help verify more of the story around these.
Yea, I’m not sure why CGC won’t designate the silver stamp as a variant especially since a couple of users on here have a sealed version of it. I’m also not familiar with the process of trying to get CGC to designate it as a variant but I’m hoping this find can move things forward in convincing them.
I appreciate the suggestion. I don’t ever grade any cards so I didn’t know they had a support area to submit a research request. Thanks for the heads up and I’ll submit some documentation whenever I get the chance and see what they say!
I’m not even sure how much the silver stamps fetch but I’d like to focus more on getting the silver stamp a designation with the grading companies. I don’t care much about the price of these cards and find it more valuable to gain more concrete information about their origin.
okay to make a serious response. Just so you know, the way that kind of hot stamping works, is you use foil ribbons. Just the shiny material that is stuck to plastic sheets. There is no ink involved. They just took normal cards and laid the stamp over it. So what happened was probably as simple and innocuous of, they started with one color, ran out, and just grabbed whatever other colors they had. So probably started with gold, ran out, grabbed the silver, and maybe had a small amount of a “white gold” color to explain the more rare silvery goldish ambiguous color. I doubt there was anything intentional behind it.
We know that the silver ones were indeed packaged up, so its not like they weren’t ever meant to end up in peoples’ hands. Its a hazy situation as far as I know at least. I’m not some expert and didn’t work at wizards or kraft or live in australia.
Thank you for all the information. I wasn’t exactly familiar on how the promo stamps were added to the cards. That definitely makes sense. If it did happen that way, it would have occurred early on since I believe the silverish stamps have been found in the distributor packs. I don’t believe the silver stamps were found in the single-card cellophane packs with the waffle-pattern crimps at the ends (which I believe were the majority of the ones inserted in the Kraft Singles packages).
Still waiting on that process breakdown on signature cards… Some of us may like to learn foil embossing.
I will say that the process is not always foil ribbons because it depends how they were making them. It can be as simple as small foil sheets (like 3in by 3in) if they were made inhouse and by one station with a single stamp embosser (who knows how they tried to cut costs back then). I agree with solemnstar that if the colors were close (maybe different manufacturers of the foil color) that they may have tried on some and then determined that it wasnt correct and shifted back to gold with many of those stamped being put aside. Or may not have noticed that some got out.
I know, I had health issues hit me like a sack of brick and I finally figured it out so I’m catching up on things that I needed to do urgently first. I’ve made a few promises related to card stuff which I’ve yet to make good on. oops. Thanks for holding me accountable and lighting a fire under me.
I’m definitely leaning towards some getting packaged before they realized it and collected the rest of the loose cards to be destroyed. Otherwise, how else would the original owner obtain these many at a single time? I doubt a collector was purchasing all the ones he saw on eBay during the early days. The only other thing I can think of is that a bunch of distributor packs were taken home instead of being handed out but I’m not even sure how many sample packs were sent to each Kraft distributor. Even then, I would assume that the collection would have contained all the other Team Rocket cards that came in those distributor sample packs but that wasn’t the case.
Unfortunately, it will remain a mystery. The person I bought it from is a sports card collector and he can’t recall where exactly he purchased it from. All he remembers was that it was in a big box of cards that he bought a long time ago and recently came across it again after all these years. I still think there might be a connection to the square cut Aquali holos that were in there also. Definitely seems like they came from a rejected pile so that’s why I’m leaning towards these Dark Charmeleons were also meant to be disposed of.
