I’ve been wondering the same thing! But I guess the most likely answer is that there were simply no Tropical cards released in those years. Would be awesome to discover otherwise though.
For the 2001 card, the information I’m reading is that the Japanese variant (with 24 released copies) was called “Tropical Wind” but for the version of the card that was released in the Tyranitar Half Deck (12 Japanese, 6 English, 1 French, 1 German, 1 Dutch) it was re-named “Tropical Breeze.”
I am not sure if there is any distinction between the Japanese 2001 Tropical Wind with 24 released copies and the 12 Japanese copies that were released in the Tyranitar Half Deck (if not, then the distribution of the Japanese 2001 Tropical Wind should actually be 36, otherwise they should be considered 2 separate cards with distributions of 24 and 12).
@hyruleguardian@burnedos Hmm, so the Tropical Mega Battle also had an Italian winner, and the Dutch one received an English deck? That does make more sense. I’ve heard someone say the English Mantine from the Tropical Mega Battle had 10 copies. I wasn’t sure if he meant exactly 10 or roughly 10 (read 9), though. But it indeed wouldn’t surprise me if the Dutch winner received an English deck as well, just like the Portuguese winner.
Also, I’ve heard this same deck was also given at the 2002 World Championship. No idea about quantities or languages for those, though. But if this is true, I guess it does also answer 1/3rd of my question of this thread: the 2002 card was the same as the 2001 card.
"This card was distributed in several languages at the 2001 Tropical Mega Battle tournament. Distribution as follows: JP - 12. EN - 10. FR - 1. GER - 1. ITA - 1.
So there is literally only 1 French, 1 German and 1 Italian Tropical Breeze in the entire world? Doesn’t that make these cards the rarest in the world?
Have the french, german and italian ever appeared online?
Edit: Lol just looked on ebay and seems like smpratte put the japanese one up for half a million:
The equivalent card given out at the 2000 Hawaii Tropical Mega Battle was Bilingual Lucky Stadium:
There was no Tropical Mega Battle in 2002 (replaced with WOTC World Championships) and no World Championships in 2003 (licensing issues), so the “Tropical” series resumed with the 2004 World Championships.
Not to go too off-topic but for the 2009 Design Contest 65 runner-ups received 1 copy of their design entry as a jumbo card. If they were actually distributed (which I have no reason to believe they weren’t) this means there are 35 jumbo Arceus and 30 jumbo Pichu cards with only 1 copy in existence.
There are several other examples of cards with only 1 known copy. Just because there’s only 1 of them however doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily fetch a premium - I’d guess that the 9 English copies would always outsell those simply because they’re not English.
I am intrigued by the possibility of some Worlds 2020 cards sitting around in a building or an office somewhere… The announcement of the cancellation of Worlds was made on 31st March, with the intended dates to be August 14-16.
I have no idea how far in advance championship cards are printed but it is possible they had already been made before the announcement of cancellation.
I wonder if these cards will be forever lost to time, or if they may end up on the market someday.
@goldcrest, it’s likely they started considering cancelling by mid-March, which would’ve put any design plans on hold. Five months is more than enought time to design and print the card, especially if they wanted to wait and include Pokemon from newer TCG releases or the Sword and Shield expansion pack. I would be very surprised if a card had been designed and printed prior to March, though of course it is possible.
I’m assuming that a regular set release with millions of cards printed in multiple languages could easily be a five month or longer process in terms of reserving printer time, quality checks, card and game design, contracts, distribution plans, product control (boosters, boxes, theme decks, blisters) etc. But printing one card with a few thousand copies + stamping, likely much less time.
Unfortunately that’s correct, they all feature designs made by the runner-ups. I’m working on a blog post which details all of the runner-up artworks but it’s a long way from completion. So far I’m only aware of what 10 of the 65 designs looked like after almost 2 months of searching.
