One of my friends got early access to a Celebrations pack and pulled the Base Pikachu Full Art.
Here’s a picture of the card:
As you can see they even brought ‘Print lines’ back for the 25th Anniversary 
If anyone else wants to complain about the rushed quality of English Modern or show off bad printing this is the thread!
The fact that one print line is considered bad now… new collectors should never know the horrors of BW-early XY.
Yeah I can’t even imagine back then but It’s 2021 and they still don’t know how to properly make cardboard… Japan got it all down to a science tho
dont worry psa 10 pop will be 6.9k in about 6 months
They do, just not at 0,000000000000000000001 cent per sheet.
Pokémon has the capability and technology to make perfect cards. It’s all about profits, they are a business after all. They will use hardware as long as possible, including the printer and the cutter.
-OR-
Insert conspiracy theory. They choose to let crap cards through so the PSA 10 chasers will need to purchase more product to get a 10.
I’m assuming there’s nobody that actually thinks print lines are a problem at TPCI.
Also - re: print quality of modern sets. Have you ever seen the pop report for modern cards? Except for certain cards/sets, the chance of getting a 10 on a good nm card is like 80-90%…
Not exactly on topic but i’m really not a fan of these “early access” and “early release” names for these cards, i think they should be called only what they are which is stolen cards. They really do a lot to ruin the release of this set.
I dont see why the average person at Pokemon would care about print lines. Some pokemon fans kind of live in a bubble and dont realize that the average joe is not overanalyzing every card for perfection.
And most of these Pikachus are going to be CGC 9s. PSA is not going to be cheaper than 50 bucks probably ever again and unless your a die hard Pikachu collector, your not sending any of these to PSA.
They have to control the bell curve of the pop report somehow :galaxybrain:
I’m sorry but the entitlement of young people these days is atrocious. That card was made for kids to play with and enjoy, not for you to get a PSA 10.
Collectors see the world through their eyes too often and forget that Pokemon cards are product produced in a factory by a billion dollar company. “Condition” is entirely a collector feeling projected onto the product. The condition today is light years better than each previous era, especially BW.
Also, Modern sports print “perfect” cards, and thats a big reason why no one collects them.
I mean after all, you are buying and selling a piece of cardboard with a yellow monster made for a child for more than 3$, should be happy that modern society lets you do something so worthless and not get your head chopped off.
To add on this, I wish CGC didn’t provide the ‘inadvertent release’ category as if it is an accomplishment.
Fortunately, no on in the market cares about this label so there’s only risk in retracing it back to whomever leaked it
It’s a shame how TPCi can’t print stuff properly. I guess this is the compromise that is needed to be made if they want to make enough product for everyone. It is quantity over quality.
Pokemon cards have templates and tolerances and are subject to quality control (like everything else made in a factory) which in itself is a trillion dollar industry.
The reason the qc is shitty (which is a good thing if you’re profit minded or in it for the chase) is because Pokemon is just another conglomerate made to shit out profit at your expense, not because entitled meanies are asking too much of poor uncle Ishihara, lol.
To be fair, the QC is bad since the cardboard is cheap. The japanese cards are made with higher quality material. Maybe its a potential sourcing issue in that the quality materials are easier to get in japan verses the rest of the world.
But even if its not a sourcing issue and they just want to be cheap, I kind of dont blame them. This is supposed to be trading cards that people are supposed to play with. But I think Pokemon has kind of screwed up what its target audience is supposed to be. This should be a game, but its more like art collecting now a days. I guess they make so much money that they dont really care about anything else now a days.
The quality of the cardboard is part of the quality control.
Another thing, I don’t get why people keep alluding to children, as if things made for children are not subject to quality control.
Qualilty has nothing to do with grade. The grade of cardboard they use is low grade. If your trying to make a cheap product, its fine. With Pokemon’s case of selling 3.99 booster packs, yeah it works. Its not designed to be sold as luxury, even though now a days its becoming more of a luxury good than a basic one.
And most kids dont care if their cardboard is of the highest quality or not. Do you really think that 10 year old you cared about if your cardboard is of the finest grade?
Semantics, when I brought up quality control I was talking about quality control in it’s entirety (including selection of grades of cardboard, polyester treatments, how your operation runs based on your choice of material grade, machinery etc), not only the part of quality control involved in trying to make the lowest grade crap as good as possible at the production level.
No, I don’t think so (but the answer is yes if we compare vintage stock to new stock, which is a different thing), I do think many kids care about having cards that look mint out of the pack.