I am a Snorlax collector and have been looking for a gradeable copy of this card for forever, I can’t seem to find even semi-minty copies after almost a whole year of checking japanese marketplaces and even being in Japan physically for the hunt. I know this card comes as a promo insert with a CoroCoro Ichiban! magazine March 2013 copy and have even tried obtaining sealed copies of this magazine to no avail 
Why is this card so hard to find in a decent condition?
Welcome to the forums @GetKnoobed. Super lovely to have you here although in frustrated spirits given your question. I also want to say that you are not alone. I have been dumbfounded trying to find a copy of this promo card which does not look like it has seen things or been through the wash. Infact, one of the highs of my collecting this year is actually find a copy which is in decent shape (compared to others).
I also tried to do a bit of digging as to why the reason is since this is just a magazine insert for CoroCoro.
Following are my hypothesis, which may be wrong, but I am forming this based on what I tried to find
- This is the first CoroCoro Ichiban! magazine to feature a Pokemon promo card I believe. I did not find another earlier release with Pokemon insert. Is it possible that they were not aware of supplementing Pokemon cards for this magazine in a good way? I am also not sure if there were other cards from other franchises supplemented before or not.
- CoroCoro Ichiban! was a magazine meant for lower grades of elementary school. So really young children who do not know or care about card handling.
- CoroCoro Ichiban! is a bit different than standard CoroCoro Magazine. Smaller size like a book but the page finish was not glossy. This point is only relevant because I feel the magazine and inserts are easier to deteriorate in long storage.
- The Snorlax 207/BW-P was also released as a regular set card. Maybe people could not differentiate between the promo and regular copy and all cards were just handled poorly?
Again, these are just assumptions and not truth. We have other more knowledgeable Snorlax collectors on the forum who may have much better insight.
I wish you success in finding the card in a condition you can be happy with for your collection.
Cheers!
Thank you for the response and the wishes! I have been a long time lurker and decided to see if any other Snorlax collector has ran into the same problem as me haha.
I didn’t know this was the first CoroCoro Ichiban! magazine to feature a Pokemon promo card though, that is a very interesting (if it is true).
I have a few beat up copies of this card and would agree that it is difficult to differentiate from the original set cards (which I also have in my collection) since its differentiating holo is usually quite faded and I have seen quite a few mis-listed copies on Japanese marketplace sites.
Also congratulations for coming across a copy in decent shape! My ultimate goal is to collect one of each Japanese Snorlax Pokemon TCG cards/ Snorlax cameos in a PSA 10 and this is one of those cards that would probably be my biggest hurdle (since there are no gem mint copies yet) hence this post 
@rabby250 has complained about the suffering of trying to get recent Corocoro promos in good condition, so I can easily see this being a consistent issue ever since their very first promo.
Snorlax was the first to feature the magazine’s logo. The very, very first promo to come inside Ichiban was 076/PCG-P Ho-Oh ex in Ichiban Volume 2.
(Yeah this is one of those tables Rabby made and slacked on updating. lol)
And I don’t really remember how Snorlax was packed, but let me give you an example of how bad CoroCoro packaging could be.
See that yellow plastic thing on the right?
It was packed with the card without any protection, and pressed hard against the card when bookstores piled up the magazines.
Bring pack peeled cards!
The Snorlax 207/BW-P was distributed in a paper sealed sleeve like many of the Japanese promos that came in the Pokemon Trainer magazines. There was also another promo card that came with this volume of CoroCoro Ichiban! but I can’t remember what the series was called and whether the two cards were packaged together in the same sleeve or if there was a paper divider between the two. (I will see if I can find the paper sleeve, I believe I kept it).
This is also a card I tried to track down in gem mint condition for my Japanese Plasma Gale Collection, though it would be a nice addition. Unfortunately, I also had no luck and even after opening a sealed copy of the card (that took some time to find) it came out damaged straight from the sleeve. It was mainly the corners and edges that stood out straight away, showing whitening already present. I thought the card looked like a PSA 8 at best and put it away in a box to be graded one day (one day). At the time I believe the top grade was also a psa 8 (however I can see there is a 9 copy now). I feel @mrbubbles first proposed reason for the damage due to the supplementation of the cards for this magazine might have contributed too (but i can’t remember the other car being damaged to the same extent) and/or perhaps the damage took place in transit between the printer and publisher, the last thought I have was that the holo finish might have been more fragile than other pints, but we have seen this finish before so I feel this might be less likely the cause. So, I feel most copies are probably damaged even straight from the sleeve and just got worse due to the other reasons mentioned by @mrbubbles .
If I find the card and paper sleeve i will post photos. All the Best with your search op.
Doh! I wish I found this thread a month ago. I’m a longtime collector, and I guess.. a lurker here since as far as I can remember (Scott helped me out immensely in 2017; he’s my God)…
Anyway in my last round of grading last month, I opened and sent in my sealed JP promos from BW-SM. I didn’t think there was anything uncommon in there at all, but one was the Snorlax 207 promo. What I want to say about it is this: nothing could have been stored better. I got the promo around 2015/6, with others, sealed in the insert. It was put then in a large top holder with a dozen others, stacked vertically, and put in a drawer until last month. Meaning: it was never even looked at in a decade.
I’m attaching pictures here, but sadly the card is already at PSA. Of course I’ll update it when it goes through grading.
The corocoro paper insert was flawless crisp and sealed. I handled it gently, but the top did not tear cleanly, as you can see, but it didn’t damage the card. Inside the insert was the card and a protective/advertisement card, and I think this is where the issue lies (on top of the promo being that easily damageable gloss with the impossible blue borders)…
The protective card is smaller than a standard pokemon card. So no matter how snugly they were inside the paper, the edges of the promo was always unprotected except for the paper, which was just barely larger than the card.
There was only the simple 2 part paper glued at 4 sides, a protective small card, and the promo.
All I’m trying to say is that nothing could have protected this card more. I expected it to be as flawless as other JP promos are. But it’s not. It’s not bad either at all, it’s clean and crisp and perfect, until you look close. Iirc there are two white rub spots in odd areas/ not corners. I think, top and side. I’ll attach a pic as soon as PSA scans it.
I am hoping this card hits a 9 but I could see an 8 or a 7 if they are being strict and not going off the earlier graded copies. The only PSA 9 of the card is on eBay right now, and in my memory, my copy has less obvious ‘wear’.
I love Snorlax, and I only waited this long to grade the card because I didn’t know I had it (perk of not speaking JP?). I have a second copy in my promo binder that is beat up and I’m going to grade that one too.
Anyway that’s a rant but this is the place for it, right? I think a combo of 1) kids magazine placement 2) relativity low distrib 3) gloss and weak blue borders 4) packaging raw in sleeve with unhelpful protector insert … has made for a weirdly low population of a truly awesome card.
Pictures attached..
this is absolutely insane, thank you for the pictures of the insert too, it would aid in my own search for a mint copy. I also hope you get the first ever PSA 10 of this card!
Firstly welcome to the forum active status. It is super awesome and also insightful to have you commenting and become a non-lurker. Thank you for sharing the info on the insert. On the outset it looks like every other magazine insert which was released in the paper sleeve format, except for the additional advertisement insert. I am not sure if other CoroCoro magazine inserts have had additional cards in them besides the ones that were advertised.
But, like you state, maybe the poor condition of this copy does result from the little insert or maybe it does not. I think the copies I see on the secondary market are much worse than how you describe, which is very unusual for similar promos of this nature.
I am looking forward to your PSA grade update. I hope you get the best possible outcome.
Cheers!
Thank you Mr. Bubbles and others. I’ve been pretty comprehensive, obsessive, and A-Z deep-diving in my collection … though so private that the information hasn’t gone anywhere. I hope I can put it to use here (and earn the right to ask about how best to reliably find 30th JP promos this year!).
But as for the Snorlax, the more I look the more the super low pop really blows my mind. My card that I describe above has gone to ‘grading’ at PSA and I have scans to share.
There are of course, a ton of dust and sleeve scratches here, but this was a really perfect card… except for iirc, two faint wear issues that came with the card- one I can immediately identify here. It’s the mark on the top of the top left corner on the front of the card. The surface is clean otherwise, and I can’t immediately find the second issue. (On second glance I believe it’s on the left right at the text level, left edge.) This is really very minimal but on a JP modern card ugh, it’s like a gut punch.
That being said, the single PSA 9 on eBay right now has far worse ‘damage’. Normally I would say mine can’t be a 10, but maybe, miraculously, this might be the best copy of this card out there? Guys that is so hard to believe since I assumed some of you had the best JP promo collections on the planet. Tbh I assumed Scott had boxes and boxes of sealed promos.
I think I mentioned that I had a second copy of the Snorlax in a binder, so I sent that one off to PSA as well. It’s not great but it’s only edge wear, and it means I can let one go to a collector who really wants it.
We’re probably 6 weeks from the pack fresh Snorlax being completed, and the binder copy has an est date of October lol. I wish these scans were cleaner! Lmk if you can spot any other damage?
Best of luck on the grading! I can add a few more points on this card, both the general difficulty of getting it graded and also the specific card itself.
Previous posters have touched on a lot of issues with the magazine packaging and distribution, but also the card itself likely contributes. Team Plasma cards (especially non-holos) are notoriously difficult to grade because the blue border shows front wear very easily. Everyone knows JP cards are easier to grade than English because of the lighter back border color compared to English blue, same goes here. For example, we can look at the Pop of the Snorlax set card in Plasma Gale, which has only 19 10s out of 145 graded across 1st and UED. For the IG “gemrate” people, that’s 13.1% on a non-holo set card. If you look at other non-Plasma non-holos in Plasma Gale and BW more broadly the rates are much higher.
For your card, I see the wear you mention in the top left corner and also some more issues. Might just be the scans but I see wear on the bottom edge under the Corocoro logo, on the left edge between the Ability box and text, and a tiny nick on the top right corner. The card is also off center 58/42 by my measurement.
I would say a 10 is definitely out of the picture for this card. With the wear that’s present, assuming it is wear and not scan issues, anywhere from a 7-9 would not surprise me. Certainly with a card that has condition issues like this, any NM or better copy is still a great accomplishment and something to be proud of.
Perhaps adding a bit more context, If that’s the Block ability Team Plasma Snorlax, that deck was pretty popular during the BW circuit. Not sure how popular it is in Japan to use the magazine promo copies for their decks, but literally that Snorlax was everywhere in the competitive scene for a decent while. One of my friends was obsessed with using it and Thunderus/Kyurem back then.