I am stuck inside on a rainy/stormy Sunday here in the UK and so I was taking a look over some of my cards and I had some thoughts comparing these two cards side by side.
The English card is obviously more nostalgic and I prefer the yellow boarders.
However, for me the artwork on the Japanese card has more pop! Its more vivid with the flame from Charizards mouth, I like the holofoil pattern and I think the Japanese characters are more visually attractive too. I would struggle to pick a favourite but in terms aesthetics I feel the Japanese one wins it. (Could be a controversial opinion but hey makes for a more interesting discussion )
Unlimited base Charizard do look a little pale and dull. The shadowless/1st edition prints are a bit more similar to the Japanese. Japanese cards in general do look better, but the nostalgia factor is strong with old English cards!
I prefer the Japanese layout a bit more than the English one. I like the finer border on the Japanese cards, I also like how the border is gold opposed to yellow. I like the star pattern on the English holos but I prefer the galaxy holo more, I love when I get a nice swirl. I don’t like how the background on the English variant looks somewhat diluted, almost pink. When I bought my 1st edition copy I made sure it was more on the red shade of orange opposed to the pink or corral shade of orange. I also don’t like how some English shadowless/1st edition Charizard artworks make the creature look a little too tanned, almost like a rusty shade or orange. Mind you it’s only some of them. I absolutely think the Japanese artwork of Charizard is the perfect shade of orange same goes for the background color. Aside from all the color variations I also prefer Japanese characters opposed to the English alphabet, despite me not actually being able to read Japanese. Oddly enough I think the Unlimited variant of the English card has a really sick shade of red for the background. There’s a number of differences that do the job for me in regards to variant preference. But to make it more simple for me it’s:
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