The 2009 Illustration Contest - a card quantity query

General
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After looking out for them on and off for almost 10 years, I’ve finally got my hands on my first of the 7 cards from the 2009 Illustration Contest which feature Pichu (more on that when it arrives!). With that in mind, I’ve been doing some research to try and ascertain exactly how many of these cards exist, as I’ve always doubted Bulbapedia’s claim that 100 of each card exist - if that were true, I’m sure we’d see these appear much more frequently on the open market like with the Zorua and Zoroark cards from the 2010 contest.

Weirdly, the only Japanese website I can find which references the competition is this ぽけもん(・∀・)らいふ article. I’m unable to find any other pieces of Japanese reference material, and sadly I don’t own any of the 12 Shogakkan magazines it references (nor can I read Japanese text, which wouldn’t help I suppose!).

This particular article’s content consists entirely of:

Which with Google Translate translates as:

I’ve made the relevant part here bold. I’m pretty sure this article is where Bulbapedia got its current information from, also.

I’m really dubious about the “set of 100 award winning cards” claim, as from my research this was the same as the 2010 Illustration Contest, however unlike the 2009 cards the 2010 cards are always available on one of the Japanese auction websites or eBay (there are 6 ungraded cards on YJA and 1 full PSA set and several other PSA-graded cards on eBay right now), whereas the 2009 ones practically never appear at all.

On top of this, PSA’s pop report for the two different contests has 376 of the 2010 contest’s cards graded (~37.6 each) but only 43 of the 2009 contest’s 12 cards graded (~3.58 each).

If we directly compare the 2009 and 2010 contests, we could come to the conclusion that as 10x fewer cards have been graded, 10x fewer cards exist. This would mean that instead of 100 cards being given to each of the 12 winners of the 2009 contest, as with the 10 winners of the 2010 contest, only ~10 cards were awarded. This could mean that each winner received 10 copies of their card, or 1 complete 12-card set - which appears to be how this new 2019 contest is operating.

But we can’t jump to that conclusion without solid evidence. PSA may have been significantly less popular in 2009, or the 2009 winners may all simply be much less likely to want to part with their winning cards.

Can anyone find any additional material about this contest?

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I’m also rather intrigued by this part:

Which translates as:

This implies that either 60 jumbo versions of the winning designs exist, or that 60 individual jumbo cards with runner-up designs exist. I’m unaware of the existence of any of these, yet this would imply that there are a lot more cards for me to look out for as a Pichu collector.

This is what a “DX monster ball DP” is, for anyone thinking it might be some jumbo Poké Ball card.

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I’ve managed to track down some scans of CoroCoro from PocketMonsters.net but I don’t notice anything which relates to this contest.

There are some references I’ve seen which point through to pokemon-movie.jp, but the news section on that page only goes back as far as November 2016. Unfortunately the entire website appears to have been heavily Flash-based back in 2009, making Web Archive redundant.

Unfortunately there are no scans of January 2009 and only 1 image from December 2008. I realise that these aren’t full scans, but I’d have thought somebody would have mentioned the contest, yet there’s nothing.

Bulbapedia’s news page is riddled with stories mentioned in magazines around the time about the upcoming Japanese set and animé episodes, but there’s absolutely nothing about this contest. It’s as though all trace of this contest was removed from the internet, which is a little frustrating.

Perhaps the reason so few of these are graded is because nobody knew it was even happening. However that doesn’t really explain why they so infrequently appear for sale compared to the Zorua cards. Even comparing this to the Japanese Art Academy contest has discrepancies: yes, most cards have only been graded a handful of times, but others have double digits (up to 40 in one case) - if 12 people were given 1,200 cards between them, I’d fully expect a couple of them to have cashed in by now. With the 2009 contest, the most graded card is the 5th Grade Arceus which has 5.

In terms of averages:

  • 2009 Illustration Contest - 3.58
  • 2010 Illustration Contest - 37.9
  • 2015 Art Academy - 6.1*

* Bearing in mind though that the 2009 contest cards have been around for 6 extra years, I wonder what that count will look like in 6 years’ time.
I’m really interested to see if anyone has any more information about this!

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You assume the 100 number is accurate for the Zoroark contest but not the 2009 one?

We know the Art Academy winner received 100 copies *of the same card*. Naturally, you’d expect some winners to be more eager to sell the extra copies they own, so comparing pop averages is not meaningful because the Art Academy will have excessive outliers. The 2009 winners received sets of the artworks, meaning they have far less duplicates to put onto the market.

Using pop as an indicator is far from ideal but it’s probably the best we got. Art Academy and 2009 have very similar numbers, especially after consideration of what I mentioned above. The obvious exception is the zoroark set. I’m extremely skeptical that the zoroark was only released to the #1 contest winners or maybe the reported quantity given to the winners is inaccurate.

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Ugh, I hate Proboards. I just lost my reply as it returned a 404 when hitting submit so I lost it all.

I tried to reply basically saying about how I feel it’s more accurate for 100 of each of the 2010 contest cards to exist as I feel PSA having graded 37.6% of them makes some sense. The figure for the 2009 contest is only 2.29%, however, which seems incredibly low. The reason to compare this to the Art Academy contest is that distribution method was somewhat similar, but even that has 3 times more cards graded by PSA than the 2009 contest.

Bulbapedia’s article claims that the 2009 contest saw 13 sets distributed to each winner (156 cards per winner in total), and that the 2010 contest saw 10 sets distributed to each winner (100 cards per winner in total). Unfortunately it has no references whatsoever, so I have no idea where they got either of those pieces of information from.

Bulbapedia’s information also contradicts the ぽけもん(・∀・)らいふ article I linked in my first post.

If it’s feasible to assume that PSA have actually graded 37.6% of the 2010 contest’s cards, I feel it’s also feasible to assume that PSA have graded a similar number of the 2009 contests’s cards, making for a much, much lower distribution quantity - not 156, not 100, but more in the region of 10-12 (1 complete set per winner, perhaps).

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There was a seller on yj who sold majority of the 2010 supply. It was the same person listing sets. People thought they would always be available, but of course they ran out. Identical situation to noodles raincoat art academy card.

It’s an impossible task to put an exact number on any release, especially modern. As experienced with art academy, extra copies hit the market.

Was that seller on yj a winner? Were those extra copies? Who knows. Ultimately all of these are extremely rare items and no one is ever going to know an exact number.

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I wasn’t aware of that, I guess that’s a shame for the other winners as they’d probably be more valuable now had that not happened.

I’d love to see some scans of the advert for this competition in any of the 12 magazines it featured in as I’m sure that’d give a run down of what the winners were expecting to receive.

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Most 100-card release that was given to multiple people instead of one person (Art Academy) always have extreme scarcity. For example the 2009 illustration contest winners cards, the 2009 Secret rare scramble set and the 2016 XYZ Ash’s Greninja.

The 2010 illustration is a curious case and I personally believe a lot more than 100 have been distributed. Look at the participation entry prize and the other winning art cards in the PSA pop. If we follow the number of cards that should have been distributed, there should be 660 participation cards and 100 winner cards. The PSA pop definitely shows otherwise. Having only 7 out of 660 of the participation prize cards graded while 30+/100 of the winners cards graded?

Majority of the other limited cards have had only around 0-10% of their released numbers graded. Even the lottery e promo Charizard had 124 out of 5000 graded and it’s a Charizard.

So personally I think the 2009 illustration contest had 100 of each released while the 2010 had a lot more.

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To add more context, the speculation on the 2010 YJ seller was similar to pkonno. Assumed they worked or had some connection to pokemon or the release.

Either way I agree 2010 has more supply, mainly because of that individual. They were without a doubt the majority supplier.

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