Unlimited L1 Legend cards?

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Edit: it seems that the unlimited legendary bird LEGEND cards in Japanese from L1 were second place prize winners in the legendary pokemon present campaign. 5000 of each exist, still pretty rare!

Hello everybody,

There are a few unlimited L1 cards, 3 of which are Cyndaquil, Totodile and Chikorita. A few of each exist and @hamster owns a trio of them.
The working theory is that they were handed out in some sort of shareholder meeting.
Others that I found were Pichu holo, pokemon collector, the lugia legend bottom and top cards and the Ho-oh legend top and bottom cards. They have got super low overall pops. These 6 cards were all graded by PSA. The energies are also available in unlimited, but this seems to be the standard with the energies.

I just found these listings on yahoo Japan:

page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/o1005755034
page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/t1005751889

The seller is selling 18 pieces of the top and bottom of both the lugia and the ho-oh. He says that they were only available in the lottery that also had these 6 cards as prizes:
However, the picture shared in his listings:

I translated it a bit using google translate, but that does not work as really good :sweat:
So the 2 options are that there were 10000 prizes with this lottery, 5000 for the shiny cards and 5000 for the legend cards. Or that there was a total of 5000 prizes, and you could choose between getting the shiny cards or the legend cards. If the latter was the case I would guess that the legend cards would be really rare since they could be obtained from packs, and thus would not be chosen over the shiny cards. The latter would also indicate that the shiny cards did not have a distribution of 5000 but at least a bit lower than that.

I dont know if this is common knowledge, but I guess this is a small step in uncovering this mystery and could maybe help with other L1 mysteries.

Here are the pictures that clearly indicate that they are indeed unlimited:

This is my first longer thread, so I apologise if it was hard to go through :confused:

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It was 5000 copies of set A and set B combined. Also the unlimited Pichu holos and Pokemon Collector trainer card are mislabels by PSA, they are actually 1st edition (https://efour.proboards.com/post/279200).

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I’ve been nagging PSA to fix those for over a year now without any luck. It’s really annoying. Especially annoying that the Pichu makes up part of the Pichu Master Set on PSA’s Set Registry as well - a card I can’t tick off unless I buy one of these mislabelled cards.

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If you’re interested in this campaign and what’s written on the ads, I’ve translated them here

pokumon.com/article/legendary-pokemon-present-campaign/

Only the Lugia and Ho-oh Legend unlimited L1 cards are limited to special campaigns. L2+ all had unlimited print runs of their full sets, but L1 was only printed in booster packs as 1st edition

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Shareholder meeting? Is there any evidence that somewhat leads this theory into that realm? Ive always know them to be rare but not sure where that idea comes from.

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The only thing I have seen that could explain more unlimited L1 appearing is from this rare toysrus exclusive version of the dpt gift box. It could explain the apparent non existence of the cards since as you can see from the packaging there is a 1 in 15 chance of the contents being an L1 pack.

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I remember you sharing this before. It’s puzzled me for a while though. The box itself was released almost a full year before the Legend set was released (www.pokemon-card.com/products/dpt/dpt_02.html) and the only thing different about this box and the main release is that it has this booster pack sticker thing on the front.

@dreamtech are you able to translate what it says on the pack sticker itself?

At this point my assumption is that there are no L1 unlimited cards except for the the birds (which have known origins) and the 3 starters (which still have unknown origins). If it were any other PokĂ©mon than the starters I’d probably think differently, but it seems too much of a coincidence that only the starters would have surfaced if the entire set was released in unlimited.

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@pichufan , Yeah moreso I was thinking if more cards are found might be from that release. I am torn though it would be amazing to see more L1 cards appear and would add more mystery but at the same time it would mean that there are 2 impossible Gyarados to find lol. Here is a more close up image

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Thanks a lot for clarifying, seems that it was not a mystery at all, but I did learn something new today, thanks!

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I dont know if shareholder meeting is the right word, but I think I read somewhere on efour that the theory right now is that they were released in some meeting of the highest people in pokemon. Comparable to maybe the Ishihara gx release or maybe the distributor piplup/turtwig/munchlax.
But this may just be a theory without any evidence backing it up. I will try to find where I read it.

Edit:
This is where I think I read it, not even a theory, just a brainstorm it seems:
www.elitefourum.com/t/1st-edition-timeline-lets-iron-it-out/16054/63

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The pack sticker doesn’t say anything special:

Because the box set was released in 2008, and the HGSS collections were released later in 2009, my hunch is that Toys R Us / TPCi had a bunch of these “previous gen” boxes laying around that they couldn’t sell. So they produced this sticker “blind bag” and stuck them onto the box sets aftermarket to get more people to buy them.

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I have to second the opinion that the 1 of 14 random expansion packs were placed on to Toys R Us products at a later date and after Heart Gold and Soul Silver L1 was officially released. I say this because the random packs are market at the bottom c1995-2009 so they were certainly not produced in 2008 like the dpt gift box was. These random packs where also found on other items like the Leafeon vs Metagross Expert Deck Kit which was released on 20th November 2009, which was a whole month after HGSS L1 was released in Japan on 9th October 2009. Like @dreamtech, suggested, I imagine these Random Packs were placed on items that where not selling particularly well, so I imagine they were placed on products at a later date to their release.

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I don’t have any information to confirm the release date exactly of the random pack and if I did that wouldn’t confirm that the L1 packs in the random pack are unlimited or 1st edition. However, I find it hard to believe as others have suggested that if Pokemon did print these boosters for these random packs (which seems hard to believe in the first place as I imagine there was an over production of L1 packs in relation to demand at the time) in unlimited why have we not seen these L1 unlimited cards other then the few reoccurring ones mentioned. For that reason I imagine L1 booster packs were never released.

Even if unlimited L1 packs were produced in small quantities like unlimited L2 and L3 booster packs which we only see once in a blue moon. I would have expected to have seen unlimited L1 cards like we have seen unlimited L2 and L3 cards.

Anyway I don’t have added too much but just wanted to share some extra information and reinstate what has already been mentioned.

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@jrugenious212 in terms of timeframes the LEGEND Perfect Set (www.pokemon-card.com/products/legend/legend_ps.html) was released in July 2010 and those contained 1st edition L1 packs.

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I understand and am aware of that, however I was under the impression that the talk of the 1 in 14 Random expansion packs was being suggested as they may have contained an earlier print run of the L1 booster packs that where unlimited. I was under this impression as I thought it was speculated/mentioned by others that the unlimited L2 and L3 packs where handed out in some sort of pre release event. And that the L1 unlimited booster packs could possibly be printed and distributed in similar circumstances. However maybe I have just been reading into everything wrong.

I certainly doubt an unlimited print run came at the end of L1 as the supply of 1st edition was certainly too great for demand, as is most often the case with base sets of each era.

Regardless, I don’t believe at this stage that unlimited L1 booster packs where produced as we would have seen other L1 unlimited cards.

Hope that made sense @pichufan,

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Personally I don’t think that the L1 trio of Cyndaquil, Totodile, and Chikorita came from the Toys R Us Booster packs as there are 0 other examples of L1 Unl cards outside of the Legend Promos
 The fact we have seen multiple of that trio and the fact they are Gen 2 starters specifically points to, in my opinion, a separate release. Although I don’t have the faintest clue what that could be. Best of luck in finding what they are though, I’d love to know, they are the most mysterious cards in my collection for sure.

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Thanks for sharing! I have a copy of the Unlimited L1 Ho-oh and Lugia and I wasn’t too sure how rare it was.

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I now own a complete set of unlimited legends cards.

I wish there was a way to determine if all of the cards came from the lottery promo.

Edit - the seller said he got them in a single lot around 2 years ago on ebay. He didn’t respond when I asked if he remembered anything about the listing or if he had a link to it.

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As of yesterday PSA have finally looked into this and merged the unlimited variant with the 1st edition variant.

There are still 2 Pokémon Collector cards marked as unlimited on their pop report, but it was difficult enough for me to get them to fix the Pichu entry, so that can be one for another day.

I’m happy it’s finally fixed, but my god PSA are difficult to communicate with.

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This tweet today shows L1 prime Crobat and Typhlosion in unlimited:

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https://x.com/j2ls6/status/1931242509293830576

Incredible discovery!

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Oh no

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