@thepokemontrader, thanks for your input, I’ve updated the list! (Sorry it took me that long – I don’t check in here often) What was '637 confirmed as? It appears that instagram post has disappeared.
1 Like
Nice job on the guide! The amount and variety of expert-level information that’s available on this website is absurd.
1 Like
You might get some help from pokesyn on IG
@pokemonsyndicate.llc
1 Like
Hi. First, Thank you for your great work. I have few hundred Japanese base 1996 no rarity slabs (15 PSA of these 5 trainers mostly 9 and also 10s) so i take this quite seriously and i have bought only the OGs and thats only because your post and this thread. I actually thought this thing was fixed in the pop control, but wanted to double check. I was shocked to notice that i found multiple Gift set traders still stated as “1996 basic pokemon japanese, No Rarity”. There was also many of the mislabeled PSA slabs for sale on ebay with a price close to NR. For example this PSA 10 with mislabeled “No Rarity Base” -slab is for sale as a NR base card for about 1,7k and then there is one PSA 10 red/green gift with right label and price is 124.99$. The cards are identical with 2 rows of text.
These 3 cards are currently on ebay (the 7 and 9 from same seller and look at certs. dybow-27 and i did send him an nice message and warned that the cards are from another set and im going to contact psa, it is not my job to start suspecting anything and i only wrote because he sent me an offer of the psa 7 mislabeled 20mins ago). They are mislabeled and have also false information on psa and pop:
52360290 mislabeled psa 10
71665802 mislabeled psa 7
71665801 mislabeled psa 9
Can you or someone please update what is the situation? How has PSA responded?
I will of course send all these examples to PSA.
Thanks,
kb
ps. also this one you guys noticed earlier is still wrong. Didnt check any else. 26422138
i’ve been sitting on these for the better part of the year bc i wasn’t sure if they were actually no rarity or just from the gift set/decks. now i’m starting to think they actually are from base
2 Likes
Please see attached the original poster (i think someone maybe put it here already?) From corocoro magazine 1996 and compare. The 5 traders involved is up there so just go thru them 
I did send PSA an letter just now about:
- The NR base 1996 / Red green gift -issue. Sent them some more evidence
- About the psa set registry. The original set is seen in this poster and it includes energies. They are labeled 1996 basic and they dont have a rarity sign. By definition they are No Rarity Base set Japanese 1996 - cards. It feels stupid and nonlogixal to have a SET registry with dont include all the cards that were in the set originally. Or am i the only one
But im eager to hear what happened when you contacted PSA?
Kb
1 Like
I never knew any of this!!! I’m excited to check my cards I thought were no rarity!
Edit: none of my cards are graded, so they dont really add up to anything, but I am happy to remove a pokemon trader and a potion from my no rarity collection that were actually the gift starter set
3 Likes
This thread is a fantastic resource. Thank you!
2 Likes
good thing i collect the corocoro 96-2001 books so i have that poster
whats this one then ? it clearly has rarity symbol but the old text in it like the NR
I think that’s just Japanese base set.
4 Likes
Agree. The same cards are in the normal base.
The issue is that without this information you can mix No Rarity Base 1996 with red/green gift set 1998 because its not uncommon that the card lacks the rarity symbol in Japanese Cards. So even the 1998 gift set is No Rarity, but it is not base set No Rarity.
The value is totally different and when psa mislabeled the gift set cards, made this a bigger problem because everyone selling the mislabeled will always say that they had no idea. Usually they dont reply at all.
2 Likes
well then now we know to be careful. luckily with the pokemons themselves it is 99% easier to know and thats good coz im starting collecting this set at psa 7-8
This is easential information to every base NR collector and welcome to the quite small group of collectors! 
(i guess its quite few that has a full graded set based on the set registry that has only two 100% sets and what i generally have spoken with people . I added most of my PSAs to the registry, but there was about 10 cards that was in someones registry allready and im still waiting for PSA to free some of them. Few had a lower duplicate thats there now).
With NR base i didnt plan to get any grader related set, but i once then looked (half-mistake) at psa set registry and looked at my collection and noticed that i had almost the whole set as PSA. Actually the only one missing was PSA Charizard and Venusaur was ‘only’ a autohraphed one and autos are not approved to the set set registry (they are seen as own sets generally).
Immediatly i found an cheap psa 3 venu, but havent bought the PSA Zard yet because im in no hurry and i have it as BGS x 3 (7, 7.5 and 8) and maybe a trade would be preffered. Same goes for the Venusaur, have BGS 9.5, 9 and if i recall right, also 8/8.5 and 7/7.5 and as 3 
, That one i remember because when i bought it considered that a Venu with all BGS grades would be nice and luckily there is 0 Pristine or Black Label 10s , but im not a billionare 
and there is quite much other on my list also.
Actually, even if im a collector and have sold something only 4 or 5 times (one graded set, one psa 8 base to a friend and 6 sealed JPN 151 booster boxes to local collectors/friends. And actually a few duplicates modern).
I could consider selling some of my PSAs that i have as duplicate. Some cards have up to 5-6 copies in PSA. I could use some funds for the Zard and something else 
. PM me if youre interrested and maybe you could get a good start, but i cant promise before we talk more and ofc only if you want. This is also my absolute favourite set 
. In some cards it’s impossible to find comps or was when i bought lol and 8 is good.
And of course if you have interrest in BGS or CGC, that is something i could also consider and for me it is more about the card, but i must admit the BGS 10 BL has the nicest slab, CGC new Pristine fits some cards really well and PSA has most nostalgy in it, bit everone has their favourites. Actually also the blue cgc fits somr cards 
It was a long message, but love talking about this issue. I hope @hayo would reply to my message above and open the situation a little more because that first message explaining this was a game changer 
Kb
1 Like
@Kbab I’m glad you’ve found this article useful! To answer your question, there haven’t been any developments with PSA as far as I know. I haven’t contacted them, having never dealt with PSA in the past – I don’t even know how I could have gotten in touch. (When you see how they screwed up on no rarity cards, can you blame me for not being in any hurry to get my cards graded by them?)
Maybe someone who more frequently uses their services could get in touch with them, though. Just sending them this article to read would be a great start 
2 Likes
Thanks for replying. And absolutely no blame, 100% respect for your work for this!!
I have already contacted them, but atm quite hurry working, but i just saw they responded and seemed like they were willing to discuss further and there was a couple different issues and for the set register they gave instructions how to proceed. For a passionate collector as i am, these things matter even if it¨s a fish in the atlantic in big scale 
. It is the all time fist Pokemon TCG set / print though! If a set was released with energy cards and generally sets include them, why would this be any different.
And the basic rule is so easy. 1996 base set card without the rarity sign, it is a NR base set card . Simple as that 
BIG THUMS UP for your work hayo! And generally im surprised that this hasn¨t gotten more publicity, because people are interested about NR and the only thing why there is so little HC collectors is the low pop. It¨s not about 1st print only. Also the pop plays a huge role as we see with many Japanese sets even a decade later when the 1st edition / unlimited -ratio was wrongly estimated and the unlimited was the set with lower pop / amount of cards. In some sets it¨s basically the same as ENG base 1999 1st ed vs unlimited, but the other way (in card value).
Very happy you answered and i got a closure on that part. Now i can continue where you left it, for good reason.
I learned a lot from this thank you
3 Likes
If you don’t made sharing the details, I’d love to know what actual steps PSA said they would take towards solving the issue (be it past mislabeled cards or future orders)!
Blockquote And the basic rule is so easy. 1996 base set card without the rarity sign, it is a NR base set card . Simple as that
Actually, there might be a way to tell apart NR Basic Energy cards from later print runs. It’s a little known fact since you’d only really need it for Basic Energy and not many people care, and it might require further research, but the paper stock on the back of No Rarity cards appears to be different from later prints.
Looking very closely at the back of a good-condition No Rarity card, you will notice that the paper’s grain forms a bit of a leather-like pattern with discernable parallel rows.
On the other hand, looking at the back of cards from later Base Set print runs, the paper’s grain seems more random and discontinuous, looking more like screen noise without as much of a repeating pattern.
(All credit on this matter goes to this article from Japanese collector SetouchiLemon - @pkmn_card on Twitter)
You really need your cards to be in good condition to be able to get any information from the paper stock though, and even then it’s still pretty hard to tell. And we also can’t know for sure that they never ever reused that same paper stock in any later Base Set runs. But from early research looking at the back of a bunch of base set cards, No Rarity and unlimited, it does seem like the leathery paper grain on the back is specific to No Rarity cards.
1 Like