Winners of the 2010 Design Contest received 200 cards

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It’s widely accepted that winners of the 2009 and 2010 Design Contests along with the Art Academy competition received 100 Pokémon cards featuring their winning design. In the case of the 2009 and 2010 Design Contests this was the figure published in the various Shogakukan magazines which hosted the contest, and for the Art Academy it was information posted officially online.

Today a 2010 Pucchigumi-winning card has appeared on Yahoo Japan Auctions: page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/d538619734. Unlike any of the 2010 design contest listings I’ve seen before, however, this one includes additional images which the seller describes as not for sale but provided as proof of authenticity.

One of these proof of authenticity images shows one of their Pucchigumi cards alongside the Chosen Entry Zorua and Zoroark they would have also received (which were distributed to each of the 660 entrants whose designs made it through to the judging panel). It also includes a letter they received alongside the cards in a Shogakukan-branded envelope:

The other image, however, is where things get really interesting. It shows the pack of winning cards they received:

Most of the information here simply identifies what the pack contains - Illusion’s Zorua cards with an ID of “PCG-Z-PLP67-JPN”, however there’s an additional field here which goes against what we previously took as gospel. The field below the product ID is labelled “数量” - quantity, and instead of 100 it shows 200!

We already know that extra copies of the complete sets of the 2009, 2010 and Art Academy contest winning cards were leaked out, and I’ve posted in the past about how many more of the 2010 Design Contest cards have been graded compared to those of the other two similar contests, yet this could go a long way to explaining why that may be. We’ve had first-person testimonies from Art Academy and 2009 Design Contest winners confirming that they received 100 cards, but I don’t think we’ve ever had similar information from a 2010 Design Contest winner before.

If this 200 quantity is to be believed, my theory is that this additional number of 2010 Design Contest cards we’ve seen may also have something to do with the printing process itself. Unlike English uncut sheets which contain over 100 cards, Japanese sheets each contain only 64 cards. If the sheets weren’t mixed (different winning cards appearing on the same sheet), they would have had to use 4 sheets in order to provide 200 copies to the winner (as 3 sheets would only give 192 cards). This would give us an excess of 56 sets of cards - double the 28 excess from the 2009 and Art Academy contests (200 + 56 extra sets compared to 100 + 28 extra sets).

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Answered my own question so instead I’ll say: more solid detective work PichuFan :blush:

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@greenshoots in total 660 entrants made it through to the judging round and ultimately won some prize from the contest (10 Highest Award, 50 Outstanding Performance Award, 100 Special Award and 500 Lucky Award). Each of those 660 entrants received 1 of each of the Chosen Entry Illusion’s Zorua and Illusion’s Zoroark cards.

The pack itself also specifically says Illusion’s Zorua on it, so I don’t think they’d have mixed any cards in with the winning card itself.

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The extra 100 were manufactured for Pkonno’s basement vault.

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I don’t know what to do with this information but it is interesting

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this news is a little sad, but it does explain the higher pop/availability and lower price. Still very rare. Thanks for your hard work.

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Veryyyyyyyyyyyy intereeeeeeeeesting

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As an update to this, and to throw a bit of a spanner into the works:

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Those messages are loosely translated with Google Translate, but essentially the seller is claiming that they are a relative of the winner who is listing it for the winner as they are not very good with computers. The seller counted the cards to find that the pack contained 100 rather than 200.

I feel like this has caused more questions than answers:

  • Is this really a relative of the winner? It’s hard to doubt that they are as the listing includes a picture of both of the Chosen Entry cards and a congratulations letter from Shogakukan along with a Shogakukan-branded envelope.
  • Why does the pack mention 200 cards if it only contained 100? I can’t imagine these labels being manually typed for accidents like this to occur.
  • The seller only started selling these less than 6 months ago. If they counted the pack to find that 100 cards were included, where did the other 39 copies PSA had already graded at that point come from? (The total pop for this card is 43, but only 4 have been graded in the past 6 months).

It’s got me wondering now if the packs did once contain 200 cards but 100 of each were taken as extra copies by the staff who printed the cards before shipping the remaining 100 out to the winner.

The plot thickens.

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I’d assume the illustrator Miho Sugano was female, is this also a male name? The reply uses ‘himself’ and ‘his’ so that could be contradictory. Although that could also be a mistranslation.

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Wow, this is interesting. Regardless, I must say that I like Miho Sugano’s design the most out of all the Illusion’s Zorua.

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Mistranslation. It says 本人, which means “the person.” The machine translation can only infer gender.

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Woah, it’s always so interesting to learn more about the history of Pokemon and these type of events, the plot thickening with regards to 100 cards being counted vs 200 cards being what was printed on the pack is quite intriguing, hope some more information surfaces to solve the question!

Thank you @pichufan for the information!!

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At the very least I can confirm that the seller is legitimate. Ended up buying their posting from the end of December and my middleman in Japan confirmed with photos that the card arrived.

I’m wondering if there were originally 200 and the original artist took 100 out before handing them over to the seller, whether it’s a relative or not. That or Pokémon had a typo that never got caught.

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Let’s say the artist winner did receive 200. If the winner (or relative) were to slowly sell these 1 at a time, it would be hard to know how many have been publicly sold from this original lot. So stating that only 100 exist will increase the perceived value, instead of saying the truth of having 200 copies.

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I understand what you’re saying although, the seller is the one who brought to light this new information. If they wanted to try and manipulate the market they just would have posted a picture of 1 card and the world would still think 100 without questioning 200.

To add a little more data, when we thought it was roughly 100 copies, the price in 2018-2019 fluctuated between $500-$1000 for a PSA 10. Now with information that potentially doubles their entire population to 200, prices are now $3500-$5500 for a PSA 10.

We’ve seen it with most other trophy/prize cards, the market will swallow up these copies regardless of how many extras we see.

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The pop reports for the 2010 design contests now are making more sense. The total pop reports are around 40+ each card on avg compared to the art academy cards which are around 20+. This makes sense if the 2010 design cards had double the release. On a side note, the 2009 design contests cards are still trailing far behind.

Also if you if you look at pichu’s thread from 2019, the pop for the design cards were 37 on avg. The pops haven’t increased that much in the past 3 years even after they became popular/expensive and worthy of grading, which suggest to me that they are still limited cards without too many extra copies.

www.elitefourum.com/t/the-2009-illustration-contest-a-card-quantity-query/23277/1

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For the 2010 Illustration set in particular, I seriously wouldn’t look into the population report too much. Especially as a comparison against Art Academy cards. Even though the stats you mention look correct, it’s obscure.

For example, a seller on Y!J in 2011 only a year after release, sold 8+ sets. In relation that’s 1/5 of all cards in the report already not to mention the alleged 200 winner copies as these are more than likely ‘extras’. At least we know the 100 AA is a definitive number + a few extras.

Absolutely agree with the limited Pichu/Arceus sets. I would imagine we’ve seen the bulk of rare cards from the PoGo hype, Covid, Logan Paul, Spike in prices. I believe if all these recent episodes haven’t made owners of rare cards public their more than likely going to stay hidden for foreseeable future.

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I put together my thoughts in the form of a PSA population comparison post between the 2009, 2010 and AA sets last year which can be found at: www.elitefourum.com/t/the-pwcc-megathread/18812/3753. There was a lot of uniformity when looking at both 2009 and 2010 as if to imply that full sets had been leaked out at some point rather than the cards originating from the winners organically. This wasn’t seen in the AA contests, but we’ve since seen a lot of extra copies of those appear on the market that were previously not known to exist.

I think right now I’d conclude something along the lines of:

  • The 2009 contest had a small number of extra copies of each card leaked out (between 5 and 10);
  • The 2010 contest had a large number of extra copies of each card leaked out (between 50 and 200);
  • The 2015 Art Academy has a growing known number of extra copies of each card leaked out (at least 13).

For futuer reference, as of the time of this post the average number of cards graded by PSA for each contest is:

  • 4 - 2009 Design Contest;
  • 47 - 2010 Design Contest;
  • 27 - 2015 Art Academy (non-Japanese);
  • 12 - 2015 Art Academy (Japanese).

Hopefully we’ll soon have additional pop reports for CGC and a working one for BGS to throw into the mix. I know quite a few Art Academy cards are BGS-graded but not included above.

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