Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024

[pfm]

It’s not commonly known but most brands of printer add metadata to colour prints in the form of very tiny yellow dots that can’t be seen with the naked eye. To view the dots you need to a magnifying glass or high resolution image and you need to adjust the colour channels to emphasize the yellow.

Wikipedia article

Different brands of printers typically produce different patterns. The most prominently known one is the “Xerox DocuColor” dot pattern which was decoded in 2005. This pattern encodes the printer serial number as well as the date and time the page was printed.

EFF article

The Xerox pattern is 15x8 grid of dots that appears in a checker board across the entire page.

Many of the playtests have this pattern. With a high-resolution image it can be seen:

(yellow dots highlighted as purple)

The pattern highlighted. The lines cross out vertical columns with no useful information. Using a decoder we can reveal the metadata:

This is the date the page was printed according to the metadata.

The EFF says the year is decoded like this:

• 8: year that page was printed (without century; 2005 is coded as 5)

The dots say 011000 → 24 → 2024

I have checked multiple other cards. The “higher quality” beta playtests mentioned by @linkdu83 here Pokemon Card Prototype Discussion Thread - #348 by linkdu83 appear to have no dots, suggesting a different printer was used (some printers don’t add any dots). I have yet to find a low-quality beta playtest that doesn’t have a similar dot pattern to the above.

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Furthermore, when we look at other cards, specifically the signed ones that were witnessed by CGC:

1996 Pokemon Japanese Beta Playtest Mounted On Card Wigglytuff AUTO #40 CGC...

The full images are just high enough resolution to make out the dots:

The column I highlighted matches the 2024 encoding as best as I can tell. It also appears to be the same printer serial number

https://sales-history.fanaticscollect.com/items/PREMIER13649

Likewise for this one.

Improved contrast images from @BANKS is here: Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024 - #97 by BANKS and from @ran1n here:

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I have summarized what I know so far in this post:

Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024

Maybe I need to clarify all the information to this point. Alpha prototypes there are no yellow tracking dots since they were printed in b&w 2 variants, we can call them HQ and LQ: Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024 - #8 by pfm easily distinguished by the background there is one set of HQ, all other copies appear to be LQ LQ appear to be copies of HQ, as they pick up the same printing artifacts seen on the HQ version. HQ: inconclusive. LQ: likely a copy of HQ, whe…

Thanks to @tediorso for suggesting this avenue of investigation.

If you want to contribute more high quality scans so I can continue the investigation please send them my way.

[Dyl]

Holy Shit

[godcomplex]

Are any of these 2024 prints raw or have they been “authenticated”?

[casual]

Incredible research.

What a dangerous game people are playing buying these, pkonno really DID have a printer in his basement.

[BANKS]

Taking into consideration the personal stake that you have in these cards, you’re the goat

[lyleberr]

Does it have to be a scan or can you do this from a photo of a playtest? Does it have to have color?

[pfm]

Another observation I want to mention.

The alpha prototypes were likely designed in a tool called ClarisWorks 4 which was available in 1995.

Here I emulated an old mac and ran it:

When looking at alpha prototypes there is clearly a set that is higher quality than the others. Consider Pikachu

Consider the dots in the background:

Also note the shared print artifact that goes through the “Pikachu” text.

It’s not limited to Pikachu.

[casual]

Personally, I think it makes sense to go after the grading companies here

This is a disaster

They should be fully refunding people

[pfm]

@BANKS

Taking into consideration the personal stake that you have in these cards, you’re the goat

I will lose thousands.

[lyleberr]

[ddk]

The tragic irony of pfm believing in these cards for months only to be the one to discover the truth behind them…

[gengarbrigade]

Proud of you @pfm. You didn’t have to release this and yet you did all the same. You solved one of the biggest mysteries this hobby has seen in years. If anyone was going to do it, it was going to be you.

[Dirge]

I am stunned and impressed beyond words. Holy shit.

Does this mean they’re all fakes or just some of them?

[BANKS]

That’s what separates Greek heroes from timmys, PFM went the distance

[Will]

Great analysis as always pfm, amazing stuff

[Alec]

I think the most reasonable take is some are certainly not 1995/1996 playtest cards as we’ve been led to believe, and the rest are at least questionable.

[pfm]

@Dirge

Does this mean they’re all fakes or just some of them?

I’m still digging into it. All I can say is that I’ve seen evidence of 3 different printers for the coloured variants and one of them has 2024 in the metadata (majority of the beta). The majority of the alpha have a different set of print dots.

for example:

I have a guess at the printer brand. I don’t believe print time is encoded but the printer model should be in there.

In other words:

• High quality beta = no dots
• Low quality beta = dots in the OP
• Alpha playtest = dots above

This is my general observation, there are exceptions

[fourthstartcg]

Well there you go. I won’t speak in absolutes as it still seems like there is some information to come, but if this proves to reflect the entirety of the playtest cards it can’t be seen as anything other than an epic failure of CGC’s authentication practices.

@fourthstartcg

People are supposed to take the word of CGC that these are authentic, relying on hypothesized secret documentation that proves their authenticity that somehow can’t be released, described, or alluded to in any way. This is the complete opposite of how CGC originally built their test print authentication practices.

This was the original problem with the cards, that we had to rely on “trust me bro” from CGC and Akabane, with none of the in-depth analysis that CGC is known for. Because they didn’t do it, pfm had to, and digs up very questionable results.

I am hard pressed to imagine a more disingenuous and exploitative process. It appears like these cards and their release were deliberately engineered to fool the community. CGC at best was negligent in their duty as a grading company, and at worst was complicit in the process.

[Dirge]

Should I be impressed that you managed to do all this or should I be horrified that CGC didn’t have the means to catch this?

[neverforget50in07]

At times like these, I’m glad I’m risk adverse. I wanted to get some but there were too many unanswered questions.