The conversation in the Giant Auction Thread has gone off-topic so I’m starting a more generic thread to ask the question: How did card distributions for Battle Road tournaments work?
I’m currently under the impression that for every champion card there are 2 to 4 ‘finalist’ cards, 4 to 8 ‘stage 4’ cards, 8 to 16 ‘stage 3’ cards and 32 to 64 participation cards.
Using the PCG-P set as an example, I’m lead to believe that for every Battle Road tournament held, there would be distribution numbers like:
3 Victory Orbs
6-12 Rainbow Energy 149/PCG-P cards
12-24 Championship Arena 116/PCG-P cards
24-48 stamped Pikachu 113/PCG-P cards
96-198 unstamped Pikachu 113/PCG-P cards
Of course there are then different venues (typically 8 or 9), so we can multiply those numbers by the number of venues hosting each tournament.
This assumes that the tournament structure was something like this, where an X represents a participant of a given age division at an individual venue:
However today @pokeg left the following comment:
…which has naturally thrown a bit of a spanner into the mix as this would derail my previous impression about how these cards were distributed.
Does anyone know how these Battle Road tournament card distributions actually worked?
The values for these examples you gave purely indicate how desirable they are. Japanese collectors are crazy about rarity. Show them an XYZ Ash’s Greninja Promo and a store buylists it for $3k even though it shares the same art with a $5 promo without the stamp. But even then, the Rainbow Energy are still selling for the price you quoted even on Mercari Japan, a place frequented by Japanese collectors. That only shows low desirability.
Values work in tandem with the market. If its desirable, people would pay more, if not, then no one would think twice for an extra stamp. Look at error collectors, a wrong number listed at the bottom right of a Dark Dragonite skyrockets the price by 20 times or a missing damage on a Ninetales commands a super thick premium on it even when they share the same artwork on cheaper alternatives.
I am aware that I am directly in conflict with my question to you above by saying that so I guess the better answer to your original question is that the prices are the way they are because of desirability. Yes, sometimes it is as linear as rarity but yet again, we are all in a market with people paying more than 20cents for a Pokemon card, what is rational anymore?
TBH a lot of it is guess work. The numbers for some cards have double & tripled over the years from player testimony. Which is why I always tell people don’t marry yourself to exact numbers.
Judging by the cards Geri mentioned, I think he was referring to the newer releases in the past 10 years. Which are much more varied. Especially when you get into the hgss/lp promos.
Also I consolidated responses from the GAT to this thread.
You are aware of the fact that there were 160 2003/4 and 160 2005/6 Victory Orbs distributed? Sorry to destroy your dream but your rainbow energy is much more common than you thought.
Nope - I figure that’d be apparent by my original post. How is this information known?
If that is the case, assuming that more than just the absolute winner were awarded with a card, how does that affect distribution numbers of cards which were “given to finalists”? What constitutes as a finalist? Or were there 26-27 different tournaments?
Is information known about the number of total participants for each event?
Not sure what dream you’re on about, but I made this thread for the exact purpose of trying to work out distribution numbers. The Rainbow Energy is used as an example. I don’t especially care if there are 10 or 100,000 of those cards printed, I’d just like to have accurate knowledge rather than a bundle of vague statements.
The numbers for the victory orbs are on bulbapedia. That being said, distribution numbers of several cards are wrong on bulbapedia but in this case they are correct.
I think important to understand is that Japanese tournaments are different than we would do them in the west. „final“ or finalist card usually does not refer to the literal final (2 best players in a tournament) but rather the final stage of the tournament. This final stage is like a KO draw. Example: the Master‘s key was given to the finalists of the world championship qualifier tournament. This „final“ had a total of 6-8 players in each age category. And each of those finalists received the Master‘s key trophy (even the ones who lost every game).
I hope this makes it more clear. The weird tournament structure and distribution method of the trophy cards makes it so hard to know the numbers. But Over the years I‘ve done extensive research so we know accurate numbers for all new back trophy cards
Unfortunately none of these reports appear to have ever been crawled, so the report pages are inaccessible. This would have been a complete treasure trove of information.
I wonder if that means that 8 participants from each age division were part of the final round? If so, that would give a distribution tree per venue of something like:
27 Victory Orbs
72 Rainbow Energy 149/PCG-P cards
144 Championship Arena 116/PCG-P cards
288 stamped Pikachu 113/PCG-P cards
864 unstamped Pikachu 113/PCG-P cards
But of course that would assume 864 participants per venue which I think is a little on the extreme side.
For the 2004 Spring Battle Road event there was also a dedicated “Official Event Chart” which was featured on this archived page:
That has several defunct images, but one image that works could possibly be an indicator of how these tournaments worked:
Is anyone able to translate that?
The website had a revamp at the end of 2008 and 3 of the battle reports are now available…
Unfortunately all of the pre-Summer 2005 articles are unavailable, and there are no winner listings for Autumn events. None of these articles give any idea about participation figures or what constitutes as a “finalist”, either.
It also importantly doesn’t mention anything about any of these card distributions. The only cards it mentions are the participation ones. Other than Bulbapedia with its lack of citations there is nothing to back up the claim that the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place participants for each age division were awarded one of these winner cards.
I feel like I’ve definitely learned something about the tournaments, but I also feel like I’m back at square one.
Unfortunately it’s still missing the Winners lists form 2003 and 2004, but several articles about Spring Battle Road tournaments (like this one) indicate:
This implies that there are 4 ‘finalists’ per age division per venue, meaning “cards awarded to finalists” could imply that 108 cards were distributed at events with 9 venues.
However the report for Summer Battle Road tournaments indicate a different method was used:
This could mean that there were significantly fewer “finalists” in Spring events than there were in Summer events, givings cards like Victory Ring from Spring events lower distribution figures than Victory Orb from Summer events.
After having a skim-read through all of the event report articles available, I’m loosely concluding that, per venue (where cards were distributed):
Spring Battle Road tournaments
9 Champion cards
16 Finalist cards
32 Stage 4 cards
64 Stage 3 cards
256 Qualifier cards
512 Participation cards
Summer Battle Road tournaments
12 Champion cards
22 Finalist cards
44 Stage 4 cards
88 Stage 3 cards
352 Qualifier cards
704 Participation cards
However there’s nothing set in stone from these articles. Furthermore the only mentions of card distributions are for “participants will be given a … card” and mentions that the Champions League events awarded 4 Champions League cards per age division (12 cards in total per event).
The distribution figures Bulbapedia presents do not seem completely accurate from what these reports claim.
It would appear however that the “cards awarded to finalists” like the Rainbow Energy example I use dbefore might have a closer distribution ratio to the champion cards than I had first thought: 1:1.8 instead of 1:2 for Summer and 1:1.7 instead of 1:2 for Spring.
