The 6 + 2 Wannabe Charizard Cards of FireRed & LeafGreen

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Take a look at this card:

It’s a beautiful Pokémon Battle e FireRed & LeafGreen card with a Charizard on the front which sold in PWCC’s last auction block.
Charizard. Fantastic. 10/10 would throw money at.

There’s a bit of a problem with it though…

You see, this isn’t a Charizard card. This is actually a Biker Ernest, Biker Jordy & Cue Ball Gabriel card (or BK. JRD/BK. ERN/CB.GBR. as PSA would have you believe) and PSA for whatever reason decided to stick this card in the holder backwards.

This is not a Charizard card.

The Pokémon Battle e FireRed & LeafGreen set is made up of 48 cards split into 5 sub-sets: the Red sub-set contains the first 8 cards, 15-A001 through 15-A008, then its Green with 15-A009 through 15-A016, then Blue with 15-A017 through 15-A024 and Yellow with 15-A025 through 15-A032, finally there are 12 additional trainer cards 15-T001 through 15-T012.

All of the Yellow cards have Pikachu on the back, all of the Blue cards have Blastoise, all of the Green cards have Venusaur and - you
guessed it - all of the Red cards have Charizard on the back.

The card pictured above is card #7 from the Red sub-set. If we flip the PSA slab over, we’ll see what the front of the card actually looks like:

Here we have Magby, Pichu and Cleffa in all their glory with no Charizard to be seen.

Okay, big deal, PSA have put a card in a slab backwards. What’s the problem?

Well, let’s take a look at the full Red set, shall we, A001 through to A008:

No, that isn’t the same card repeated 8 times, those are 8 different cards which all share the exact same Charizard back.

Credit where credit is due though, A004 and A008 do actually have a Charizard on the front!

The problem isn’t just Charizard though, here are cards from the Green, Blue and Yellow sub-sets which PSA also grade in the exact same way:

That is to say there are 8 different Venusaur, Blastoise and Pikachu-backed cards which are all graded with the back at the front of the slab.

It’s no surprise that the cards from the Red sub-set which show Charizard on the back-front fetched a small premium over the others (though a Venusaur-backed card did very well in PWCC’s March auction block).

PWCC naturally listed all of these as either “Charizard”, “Venusaur”, “Blastoise” or “Pikachu” with no mention of what the cards actually are.

I don’t really know how to close this thread other than to say: lol?

Many thanks to svnaded on Instagram for sharing this with me in the first place to ask if I knew about the Pichu on the 15-A007 card - I did, but I had no idea PSA actually graded these. However I think I’ll wait for them to place these the correct way around before I pick one up!

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I use cards like these and the poker set as an indicator of whether we are still in a bubble or not

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Not sure what those weird pixel drawings are on the back of the card tbh, I bought it for the Charizard and am happy with my investment, the pop is pretty low too so it’s no risk high reward.

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I’ve just discovered that PSA did appear to stop doing this shortly after the PWCC gang were graded.
Here is one of the A007 cards in PSA 9 which is the correct way around:

513×640 63.4 KB

Maybe there is hope after all.

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PSA must love their gen 1 starters lol

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So there’s 44 cards in the regular set.
8 red
8 yellow
8 blue
8 green
12 trainer tower cards
8+8+8+8+12=44
Then there’s one corco card.
Then there’s 5 club Nintendo cards (1 red, 1 blue, 1 yellow, 1 green, 1 Trainer tower)
totalling 50.

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I collect anything with Pichu on and both the 15-A007 and 15-A030 cards have Pichu on the front.

I had meant to put 44 instead of 48 in the original post (not sure how I got 48!). You’re correct about the 6 promo cards on top of these as well. I don’t think PSA has graded any of those yet - the 5 Nintendo ones I believe are much rarer than the main set cards - fortunately there’s no Pichu on those.

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are you trying to complete the set? Yea the club nintendo cards go for $2,000 to $3,000, very rare. I’m surprised more people don’t collect them because the club nintendo cards are chase cards of the set and are worth big money. I’m not sure why nobody has graded them, probably because they are so rare, not many people have them to grade them. When PSA opens back up I’ll defiantly be getting mine graded. I have a sealed pack of fire red and leaf green

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the grader at PSA:

1440×849 81.6 KB

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Wow - I have some of these in the backlog and was really hoping to have the back of the card showing on the front like the others. Obviously the backs of these cards are more eye appealing than the fronts. I did put a note in with my sub with instructions to place Pikachu/charizard etc on the front wonder if they will follow through or contact me beforehand.

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A correctly-slabbed PSA 10 A006 sold recently for $86 and then a week later a backwards-slabbed PSA 10 A006 sold for $440 - that’s a 5.5 times increase in value purely because the card is facing the wrong way in the slab.

I’m just giving this a quick bump because I think a lot of people are still very much unaware that these aren’t actually Charizard, Venusaur, Blastoise or Pikachu cards.

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I guess we’re still in the bubble :relieved:

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Turns out there is no hope. There are now a lot of 5xx and 6xx-cert copies of these Battle-e cards slabbed backwards.

As an example, here is the same card as the one quoted above, just with the back of the card at the front:

I’m bumping this because people are still paying a premium for these when PSA slab them backwards, I guess not realising that they’re the same card, or perhaps they’re just blissfully ignorant to it.

:person_shrugging:

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How can I convince PSA to grade the Trade Please! promo backwards so I can look at the shiny back without turning it around?

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There are sports cards with variants that have replicated/mildly altered art but show different stats or info on the reverse.

www.pwccmarketplace.com/vault-marketplace/306814
www.pwccmarketplace.com/vault-marketplace/306825

Cards like this are naturally slabbed with the photo of the player on the front because that’s what people want to look at. I wonder if this thinking is carried over to the e-Battle slabbing policy: it’s assumed collectors want to look at the big, clear art and not the data on the reverse, even if the reverse is technically “the back” of the card. I’m not saying this is a correct or incorrect way of thinking about it, but that could have affected the way they’ve decided to do it.

And if nothing else, I doubt whoever decided the policy understands what an e-Reader is or what these cards were originally used for.

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@greenshoots I don’t know, it just seems like a very weird thing for them to be doing. If you wanted to collect a complete graded set would you want to display 8 Blastoise, 8 Charizard, 8 Pikachu and 8 Venusaur which are all identical or would you want to display 32 unique cards?

I don’t know anything about that Roger Federer card but it looks like one of the cards is merely an placeholder of some sort for the other? If that’s the case I think it makes sense to have them that way around.

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Because nobody cares about what’s on the front. They want the zard, blast, pikachu, venusaur.