How did card distributions for Battle Road tournaments work?

[pichufan]

@poke-geri

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

I wish Bulbapedia had citations!

This is going to be a bit of a muddled post as I’m writing it whilst researching, so apologies if things seem out of order.

I’ve done some digging and I’ve found some long-dead pages about the “Pokemon Card Official Battle Report”, which have details about events from the “2nd Champions League” in 2000 up to Battle Road Spring 2004: web.archive.org/web/20040607174626/http://www.pokemon-card.com/event/event_report/2003.html

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.

The site I found which linked to that was the also long-dead official Pokémon Japan events website, which when detailing the Summer 2004 tournament has a defunct picture with the caption:

「ジュニアプレイヤーズリーグ」を勝ち抜いたプレイヤー8名による戦い。決勝トーナメントのプレイヤーたちは、冷静沈着に見えたが、バトル場は火花が散るほど熱かったぞ

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[Translated by Google]
A battle by 8 players who won the “Junior Players League”. The players of the final tournament seemed calm, but the battlefield was hot enough to spark!

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…

• Battle Road Summer 2005: 108 winners over 9 venues (27 more than Bulbapedia accounts for)
• Battle Road Spring 2006: 81 winners over 9 venues
• Battle Road Summer 2006: 81 winners over 9 venues
• Battle Road Spring 2007: 81 winners over 9 venues
• Battle Road Summer 2007: 96 winners over 8 venues (24 more than Bulbapedia accounts for)
• Battle Road Spring 2008: 24 winners over 2 venues (6 more than Bulbapedia accounts for)

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.