History of the Pikachu Illustrator

General
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Hey guys,

I just finished watching this video with Pokenomics and Ketchumallcollectibles.

Ketchumallcollectibles says he is not an expert on this but touches on (1:12 50s) regarding there being a general consensus there being possibly 4/9/11? copies and now 34/39 copies?

I’m interested to learn about the history and I had a few questions:

  1. Is this true? If it is true, why was it once thought there was 4/9/11 copies? What were these numbers based on?

  2. If this is true: How did this then change? What happened to cause this change? Were the higher populations discovered after additional copies were graded?

  3. Where is the 34/39? number today based on?

  4. Has the Pikachu Illustrator always been the most expensive card including pre-2016?

If anybody could just shed some light on this topic for me and give me a little history lesson I would really appreciate this!

Thank you very much for all the help!

@gottaketchumall ,

Also absolutely phenomenal video, I really enjoyed the watch!

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The illustrator has always been the most expensive card.

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Christmas festivities still going on so I have to be brief. The search function on the forum is the most underrated thing of 2020 I swear. It’s been years since I took a deep dive into this specifically so that is why I threw out a bunch of numbers in the video without certainty.

Search the forum for “illustrator copies” and click show results as threads.

efour.proboards.com/search/results?captcha_id=captcha_search&display_as=1&page=5&search=Search&what_all=Illustrator%2Bcopies&who_only_made_by=0

www.elitefourum.com/t/smprattes-collection/10053/1

Somewhere in Scott’s collection thread it mentioned bulbapedia at the time “confirmed” 4 copies of the illustrator.

www.elitefourum.com/t/smprattes-collection/10053/1

This “confirms” 20: www.elitefourum.com/t/its-offfical-there-are-only-20-illustrators-printed/11692/1

This “confirms” 39 and I’m assuming doesnt account for extra copies. www.elitefourum.com/t/i-disclosed-a-secret-there-are-39-illustrators-printed/11729/1

I think somewhere in between bulbapedia listing 4 as the number of copies and 20, there was a time where the “confirmed” number was 9 or 11. Digging deeper someone could put together a timeline of how this number progressed over time. The context of our conversation in the video alluded to the fact that certain individuals may have had more information earlier on. What duty they have or dont have to disclose that information becomes a question of ones own thoughts on morality and all that.

At the end of the day even 100% confirmed print numbers arent true or exact as we can see “extra copies” are a thing. I’d link a Smpratte video or two on this topic but it isn’t easy on mobile and I’ll check back later on from my PC.

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Thank you so much for the response guys and educating me, I just watched the video on extra copies!

I’ve also seen the video by @fourthstartcg on extra copies, again very educational, thank you!

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8-27-2011 Bulbapedia says 4

9-11-2013 most likely 9

1-25-2014 20

2-8-2014 39Most recently I believe pkonno’s extra copies would be in excess of the 39 but I am not sure if anyone is tracking those. I think we would be in the low 40’s currently.

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Thank you my friend.

I was not previously aware of the concept of there being extra copies, but things makes sense now!

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Yes with Pkonno we have to assume for every high end trophy card the number will always be more than the original documented distribution. 1997 Tournament no1,no2,no3: 4+, Snap promos: 20+, Illustrator: 39+, , Unikarp 1000+ etc.
Most interestingly Pkonno actually sold the file copy of no. 2 that was shown in the Silver Bible, the holo pattern was identical.

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Those earlier numbers were in no way confirmed, not even „confirmed“It was simply random numbers that were thrown around. Basically the people selling an illustrator were claiming that there were only 4 copies in existence. As those were reputable sellers the collectors simply believed it. It was wrongfully considered the rarest card for so many years.

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Very interesting, thank you for sharing!

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Thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge with me!

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Actually, Pkonno’s 97 pikas were all file copies with the identical holo pattern. The no. 2 is more noticeable because of the swirl but in fact, the no. 1 and 3 are also file copies.

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If the Pokémon Illustrator cards Pkonno sold thus far are all extra copies, there are 42 or more Pokémon Illustrator cards. Two are already mentioned in the Pkonno2002 Sales thread: www.elitefourum.com/t/pkonno2002-the-sales-data-for-snap-cards-trophies-archive/28304/1

And I think that thread is slightly behind, because in the comments they also speak of a third copy that Pkonno posted on Zenmarket; Jauce; and Yahoo Japan (which ended up selling on Yahoo Japan for 35M Japanese Yen).

Greetz,
Quuador

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The card is fraught with a lot of people giving a lot of inaccurate information. There are posts on PokéGym from 2009 stating that 39 copies exist yet fast forward to 2013 when Scott’s copy appears for sale on eBay and almost every source discussing it makes the claim that only 6 were distributed. Even when the Heratige Auction sale appeared in 2016 long after it was known that 39 was the official figure various sources used figures between 6 and 39 - with HA claiming “20-39”.

I did some research into the card a few months ago out of curiosity. If you go back in time on the Internet you’ll find dozens of people talking about a supposed sale which occurred in the 90s where someone supposedly paid $20,000 for an Illustrator card, however none of these posts have any references to that sale - it’s basically a myth at this point - however so many people used this figure when valuing the card to the point that it’s a little absurd. Between 2008 and 2017 the highest value a raw card achieved was $12,500 (and that was in 2017), yet people were still throwing the $20,000 figure around like it was common knowledge.

If anyone can shine some light on that $20,000 sale in a way that’s more than just hearsay I’d love to know about it as that’s the only sale I’m aware of prior to 2017 of a raw card selling for above $12,500.

So to answer OP’s questions:

  1. The numbers were mostly based on outdated misinformation and assumed figures. I think poke-geri hit the nail on the head with what he said above about where those numbers originated.
  2. It changed when more and more people started realising that the number of copies distributed is actually published information.
  3. 3 separate issues of CoroCoro Comic.
  4. To my knowledge there have been 2 points in time since 2008 where a different card was on top: in 2009 the Illustrator was $6k and someone paid $7k for a 2004 No. 1 Trainer card (I’ll see if I can dig out the post about that on PokéGym later); in terms of a direct money sale PSA 10 1st Edition Charizard is currently more valuable than the Illustrator, but that’s because we haven’t seen any graded copies sell for quite some time (I don’t think?).

It’s very much a new phenomenon that raw Illustrator copies are selling above $12,500, let alone $200,000.

Both of these statements assume that all copies prior to pkonno’s sales were direct from winners. It wouldn’t surprise me if over half the current graded population are extra copies.

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That is a very comprehensive history lesson.

As somebody in the hobby for coming up to one year soon, it’s very difficult to find out historical information, which is why I end up always making posts asking questions lol!

Stuff like sales data in 2004 etc, it’s not easy to find out by any means as PSA only tracks back until 2016, so that’s all I typically know!

Thank you for all the time you have spent writing this post!

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Interesting! Thank you for your response!

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I like to throw this resource out there whenever stuff comes up: Link to Master List of the Rarest Cards SpreadsheetBut yeah, there’s not much more for me to say about this that hasn’t already been said in the thread (Edit: Oops I guess I kept saying things).

I do think the Illustrator is a great example of how information spreads. With respect to the “6 copies” aspect you basically just had years and years of various people quoting news sources and news sources quoting people and passing that information along when there was never a solid source to begin with.

Even today in the hobby, you’ll see things like extremely popular YouTubers claiming that a 1st edition Charizard is “the rarest card in the world” (even though they know that isn’t true) and you’ll see that other people / news sources quote that. Misinformation spreads extremely easily.

The 39+ number actually has merit to it though, since sources like those posted above have made a convincing case for how they were 39 awarded copies… plus whatever extras there are, of course. My personal feeling is that if count the extras / file copies, it is likely that the absolute minimum number of Illustrators printed was 64 (many of the old back Japanese holo sheets were 8x8).

Another thing worth noting - there were actually 3 separate CoroCoro Illustrator contests between 1997 and 1998. Is it possible that an 8x8 sheet of Illustrators was printed for *each* of these contests? Maybe. This is just rampant speculation. We don’t know if these cards were printed on 8x8 sheets, we don’t know if they were printed multiple times. But it’s certainly possible that they were.

Now you may be saying to yourself - wait, eBulb - there’s no way *192* Illustrators were printed?! Well, 19 have been graded by PSA, and I think a couple were graded with BGS as well. If you were to tell me that 90% of all the Illustrators that were ever printed have not been graded, that would not really surprise me at all.

To understand why, consider something like the *Named* (cards printed with the actual winner’s name, so they are extremely unlikely to be extra copies) Neo Trophies. These are the trophies with the boy/girl trainers with 2-6 Pokemon behind them. If you combine all those cards from 2000-2002, there were 106 No. 1 trophies awarded, 106 No. 2 trophies awarded, and 212 No. 3 trophies awarded. So, in total that’s 424 named Neo trophies (this doesn’t count the 3 special trophies awarded in 2000 that were actually holos with the real faces of the winners).

Of those 424 named Neo trophies, how many have actually been graded by PSA? If a quick count I just did is correct (PSA really spreads them out into different lists), something like 35 of them have been graded in total by PSA. And that includes some copies which we know to be extras (we know they’re extras because they don’t have the names of the winners on them).

Long story short, we know that less than 10% of those cards have been graded. So is it really so hard to believe that the number for the Illustrator might not be something similar?

In my opinion, it is likely that there are more Illustrators and other Grail cards that have actually been printed than most people would believe.

Now having said that… it’s all relative. Even if there are 10x the number of Illustrators that people actually thought there were, then we would *still* have an incredibly small number of cards compared to the number of people who would want one. And just because a card might exist somewhere in the world doesn’t necessarily mean it will ever see the light of day.

Anyway, I suppose I’ll stop rambling.

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IIRC Collector’s Cache made that first early sale, along with other ungraded trophy cards, you could reach out to their team and ask for confirmation? @pichufan. They have a graded 9 as well.

As for prices, while an oddity, the $10.5k Prerelease Raichu was the biggest *public* purchase during I want to say 2009 or 2010; a bit more than raw Illustrators at the time. This was when there was only one graded Illustrator, an 8, grading was not common place.

For the 4-6 number it was not purposeful misrepresentation. There was much less widely shared helpful info than there is now. Heck there were times in Pokémon where people requested payments to view their watermarked scans of rare cards. This was a very commonly held belief well before Scott or anyone else on PokeGym purchased an Illustrator.

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I love how some of these posts are supposed to showcase how people were misinformed, yet they are full of misinformation. To the point of calling a publicly sold card “hearsay”. The first illustrator ever sold was for $22,000, in the year 2000. @qwachansey hit it in the head. It was an ebay auction, along with pika trophies. Remember ebay/open market for the next point.

The copies being cherry picked that sold on yahoo japan were during a much smaller market, on restricted websites. No one mentioned how the current middle man companies and structures we have today either didn’t exist or were much more primitive. You literally had no option above 10k back then.

I bought majority of the illustrators during that slow period and most were private from Japanese collectors. Not an ex employee printing extra copies. I even bought some from Japanese winners of the yahoo auctions that people love to quote. And then of course sold them on the open market and/or in the US for way more. Because they were objectively underpriced on yahoo.

Ultimately most of the data is private, as seen with the recent 900k deal that they decided to share. Therefore people are drawing their conclusions from feelings on a sliver of information.

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I think a big part of the reason the Illustrator was always the most expensive card is at least in part because of the misinformation that it’s the rarest card.

Regardless, it’s nitpicking, because I personally can’t see how any card other than the 97-98 Trophy Pikachus competes with it. It has the combination of insane rarity, beautiful (and original) art, holo, historical significance, and featuring popular Pokémon that only the Trophy Pikas can really compete with.

And the thing that the Illustrator has going for it compared to the Trophy Pikas is the “singularity” aspect (some people say they would need all 3 Trophy Pikas for a sense of completeness, although I felt a sense of completeness when I had just the No. 1). And the other factor the Illustrator has going for it is a wider recognition that it’s “the” card. Some would also argue that it has the most beautiful artwork on a trophy card. (Debatable of course, but I have yet to see any serious collector who didn’t think the artwork on the card is top-notch).

So don’t take my previous post to mean that I think the Illustrator was overrated. My personal feeling is that an Illustrator at $900k (or the raw Illustrator pkonno sold a few days ago for $400k) are both much better value than a PSA 10 Charizard for $350k.

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1000%

To add to your point, people thought 1997 pikas were only 2 copies in total, and that 1998’s were the same/similar rarity as the illustrator, yet they never sold for the same price. I do agree that the 97s are the closest contender to the Illustrator. Their history + rarity + art is over 9,000!

Also something I forgot to mention earlier, the worst case scenario of misunderstood rarity in the history of pokemon: Birthday Pikachu. Birthday Pikachu was thought to be hundreds of copies, when it reality it is thousands and thousands of copies. Yet today the price is higher than when people thought it was one of the rarest cards.

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