It turns out that many of the early prototypes of Pokémon cards on the market were produced in 2024
Since around 2024, a large number of early prototype cards believed to have been used in playtests of Pokémon cards have been put up for auction, and the total sales across auction sites is said to be more than $10 million (approximately 1.55 billion yen). However, it has been pointed out by the card game fan forum Elite Forum that it has been discovered that many of these cards were printed in 2024.
Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024 - Articles - Elite Fourum
The following is an Eevee prototype card, one of the items in the 'Takumi Akabane Collection' signed by Takumi Akabane , who was involved in the development of the Pokémon Card Game. The condition rating is 10 out of 10. The layout is almost the same as the old Pokémon card design, and you can see that the basic rules of the Pokémon Card Game are in place, such as the concept of energy, retreat, coin toss system, and resistance and weakness settings.
According to forum user pfm, these playtest cards and prototype cards began appearing on the market around 2024. Many of these cards are prototypes, so they were not mass-produced on commercial printing presses in a factory, but printed on home or office printers.
Many home and office printers have a pattern of tiny dots printed on them that contain metadata such as the time of printing and the printer's serial number, and can be used by law enforcement agencies as evidence that a document was printed by someone else.
For example, here is a Nidoqueen test play card listed on an auction site: Since it is a prototype, the Nidoqueen illustration has no background.
If you zoom in and look closely at this background while adjusting the color channels, you can see that it contains a pattern of tiny dots, as shown below.
When you extract this pattern, it looks like this:
This pattern represents the printing time (mm/HH), day (DD), month (MM), year (YY), and serial code in binary, indicating that it was printed 'at 8:17 on June 29, 2024, on a printer with serial number 704641508.' In other words, the Nidoqueen test play card on sale was printed in 2024, and is therefore a counterfeit.
When checking the photo of the Eevee playtest card mentioned above, the dot pattern was displayed as shown below. According to pfm, when comparing it to the pattern printed on the Nidoqueen playtest card, the printing year was 2024 and the serial number was the same.
The initial prototype cards were said to have been created using
And here is the actual prototype card of Pikachu that is on sale. pfm points out that it is likely a counterfeit because the dots in the background are clearly different.
In addition, pfm points out that many of the prototype cards on display are likely to have been printed in 2024 based on the printing patterns. Comments posted on the forum include, 'Is there really a way to spot them like this?' and 'The grading company that appraised the cards will not be able to avoid responsibility.'
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in Game, Free Member, Posted by log1i_yk