I looked for a guide on this and couldn’t find it so I apologize if someone answered this already in the forum somewhere.
Does anybody have an educated guess on the ratio of 1st edition base to shadowless base?
Thanks!
Posted this in the wrong place meant to put it in just a quick question! My apologies, if an admin could move it that would be great.
Your wish is my command 
My man!
Very interested about this as well. The graded populations are generally lower but I wonder if that could be a labeling issue - I understand in the early days of PSA grading, Shadowless was not distinguished from Unlimited. I’m sure some of the long time collectors like Gary would know a lot about this.
Nobody has a definitive answer, it’s not like MTG where there’s people who were able to get inside information like this. With Pokemon Wizards basically severed all ties and pretended like they were never involved after they lost the license. It also doesn’t help that the print run was the same run.
The best information I have is from a Konami rep who says general standard in card printing is 30% of your first print run (or something like that, I’m going off memory) is dedicated to your first edition. This gets even more complicated when we learned that Wizards messed up their first edition run numbers and had to restamp some of their holo cards (creating thin stamp/thick stamp).
As far as PSA numbers go it’s a metric, but a very poor metric. The truth is most people don’t send their cards to PSA till about 2013-2015 when PSA and Pokemon are almost synonymous to collectors. So it’s not likely that the labels are off by a wide margin, I know I had one in my entire career, and most collectors have gotten them corrected by now. It’s more in the fact that people rarely submit lower than PSA 8 grades for the longest time, that trend is slowly changing, but not as fast for shadowless.
The bigger issue is that when shadowless was first released it wasn’t considered shadowless, it was just the unlimited versions of the cards so a lot of them got played with, then there were rumors that shadowless were fake so you have another chunk of them disreagared. Then you had a major set of time where shadowless was an after thought, to this day I still only keep my shadowless set in a binder as I still have the old school after though mentality.
In all, nobody knows. Most likely a larger batch of cards than 1st edition, but more likely damaged cards.
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@cullers Very insightful, glad that you made this post 
Definitely makes me cherish my better conditioned shadowless cards a little more now haha
Unlimited PSA label, Shadowless cards aren’t common. I’ve seen maybe two dozen in total since PSA grading became popular over the past 12 years, although I really wasn’t going out of my way looking for them either
With 1st ed. people knew what they were, and that they were important. But with shadowless it was just another card to be used and played with up until several people alone with Gary started designating them.
There are no print run numbers for a good reason. The exact amount will likely never be public info.
Okay good, this has been my understanding for the past couple of years. I made a video basically saying what you said above and someone was claiming to me that he knew for sure that 1st edition was much much rarer even though he had no proof so I wanted to check with this community.
@jacobm9, Although we will never have absolute certainty on the the size of the 1st edition and Shadowless distribution numbers, I would say it’s a safe bet that there were fewer 1st edition cards printed than Shadowless cards printed. The PSA population report means very little in this case.
Rewind to 1999. Most people knew that 1st edition Base Set cards were a thing, even though most people had never actually seen one. For most people it was just the stuff of legends. But the 1st edition cards were recognized as something special and more valuable than the “regular” cards.
On the other hand, almost no one recognized Shadowless as its own variant. Some people may have casually observed the subtle differences between these cards and what we now refer to as the Unlimited cards, but people did not recognize one as being more valuable than the other.
This is important because what happened is that a significantly higher percentage of the 1st edition cards were preserved compared to the Shadowless cards. Not only did you have some savvy investors (Gary, Ed) save up some 1st edition boxes but generally people who owned 1st edition cards were more likely to recognize them as something that should be left unplayed.
This also explains why there are a lower % of Shadowless cards that grade as 10s compared to 1st edition cards. It’s not because of differences in printing (both were part of the very first print run). The difference is that 1st edition cards were more likely to be owned by people who recognized the value in preserving them.
Anecdotally, far more people will be able to tell you that they grew up owning Shadowless cards than can tell you they grew up owning 1st edition cards. I am one of them. In fact, of the hundreds of Base Set cards I owned as a child, more than half were Shadowless, less than half were Unlimited, and none were 1st edition. Distribution of 1st edition / Shadowless / Unlimited cards varied by region, so my geographic location was undoubtedly a factor in this (New York City) but nonetheless as I’ve heard about this from many people across time I’ve heard of far more stories of people owning Shadowless cards as kids and far few stories of people owning 1st edition cards as kids.
The difference in the PSA population has more to do with just which cards were preserved though - it’s also about value. For a long time people didn’t really see the value in sending in their Shadowless cards to PSA, they were something that could just be kept in a binder. Over time this has been changing but Shadowless cards are still playing catch up.
Obviously, no one knows what the true numbers actually are but the idea @cullers brings up about a 30% run for the 1st edition cards certainly rings as something that could well be true (which theoretically would mean that there were ~2.33 Shadowless cards distributed for every 1st edition card).
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Out of curiosity, where does this info come from:
“we learned that Wizards messed up their first edition run numbers and had to restamp some of their holo cards (creating thin stamp/thick stamp).”
Thank you!
Makes perfect sense!
Rusty’s contact with the Wizards rep.
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Literally any of your posts you post are worth their weight in gold. Always incredibly insightful, objectively.
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Great info here, great thread
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thanks for being professionals who bring in good info to add to the myth/lore of our hobby. the buy/market segment is imploding with tons of “noise” these days.
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You can’t create a thread like this without mentioning Base 2000 (Base 1999-2000) ~
Aww shucks, appreciate it!
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I find all of this revisionist history interesting. Guess that is what happens when I disappear for a few years.
Shadowless was known and named while Unlimited was being released. I was collecting Pokemon as my kids played (at the local Zany Brainy) and noticed it as a variation. I got into a battle with A/B/U in 1999 over a Charizard holo I needed to complete my first Shadowless set. This was early days of Ebay and they offered the holo I needed. Their price was expensive for an Unlimited Charizard but I was willing to pay the premium to complete the set, since I had no idea how rare it might be. Based on the artwork I placed an order (after calling them to confirm the artwork was of the specific card). Turned out it was stock art showing a Shadowless card and they sent me an unlimited card instead. I demanded a refund and as part of my explanation of why I described the card I wanted as “shadowless” and the one the sent me as “shadowed”. I had to send them a picture and walk them through the difference. So the variation was known to some of us as soon as the cards came out. I spent the next year buying full sets based on how many shadowless cards they had.
There was a long-time Pokemon seller on the West Coast (I think his name was Gene) who I discussed “shadowless” cards with at the time. He specialized in selling WOTC sets on Ebay, and did so for many years. He sold sets of all condition, and his experience (like mine) was that Shadowless was much rarer than 1st edition, perhaps as low as 50% or even less. Over the years Gene sold over 200 1st Edition base sets but only about 100 shadowless sets.
The story we heard in the early 2000’s was that all the original run (1st edition and Shadowless) were supposed to be 1st edition. The 1st Edition stamp was a separate, independent process, after the card was printed. WOTC didn’t have enough packing materials to package all the 1st edition cards. Originally, they were going to get more boxes and booster foil. But Pokemon exploded when it was released in the US. Rather than hold up distribution by holding back first edition cards, WOTC decided instead to not stamp the remaining 1st Edition sheets. The last part of the print run (or maybe a smaller second print run) was packaged as Unlimited and shipped out to meet the demand. That bought WOTC the time to adjust the artwork and text as necessary for the much larger Unlimited run, which was huge by comparison to both Shadowless and 1st edition.
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Revision history, yet by your own account people didn’t know the differnce between shadowless and unlimited?
The inner working of Wizard is interesting, I don’t have any reason to doubt what you claim, but would like to know where you heards this. It would be easier to confirm the existance of thin stamps as a small section of the print that was getting stamped, as well as explain why some shadowless packs contained 1st editions.