Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024

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Btw I thought again to the argument already raised by some people about the inconsistency between the date of Ken Sugimoriā€™s revised artworks and the fact that the beta are supposedly from 1996.
It is quite true :sweat_smile:

I looked for the date of appearance of these revised artworks.
We find them in the CoroCoro of May 1997 (therefore published in April 1997) and many products from May 1997 (the Fan Book, the Slowpoke promo card, etc.). On the CoroCoro before May 1997, we only see the first version of Ken Sugimoriā€™s artworks.
Moreover, we notice that in the Jungle expansion (released in March 1997), all of Ken Sugimoriā€™s artworks are those of the first version, while in the Fossil expansion (released in June 1997), all of Ken Sugimoriā€™s artworks are the revised versions.
The first teaser of the Jungle cards is in the CoroCoro of February 1997 (therefore released in January 1997). If they already had the revised artworks, they would have used them for sure (otherwise what is the point of making new ones?).

So itā€™s reasonable to think that Ken Sugimoriā€™s revised artworks were indeed made somewhere between January and April 1997. Which therefore excludes beta to be from 1996 as they are using themā€¦ :sweat_smile:

Another problem is that between the alpha and the final version of the cards in the Base Set, there are a lot of differences in text, attacks, etc.
While between the beta and the final versions of the Jungle or Fossil cards, there are very few big differences (some are just text in parentheses that skip, or the end of text that skip because there is no more space (cf. the Gastly), 1 energy in less or more, there are no Pokemon Power too on all the card concernedā€¦).
It was already linked, but someone did an incredible job here to quickly compare them all: https://www.pokemonaaah.net/research/prototype/cards/

This is as if the beta cards were created based on the Jungle or Fossil ones (for the PokĆ©mon concerned), and not created beforeā€¦

I might change what I said before, and go with the camp of those who think that even the beta cards were also created from scratch recently :sweat_smile:
But this assumes that the scammers had access to the revised artworks with the original colors (they are not found elsewhere than in the Fan Book I think, and sometimes the artworks are cut in this book, so it cannot be a simple scan/cutout of them I think).

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