Despite some negativity toward the McDonald’s release, I figured you know what? All 24 starters and Pikachu, with a decent holo-pattern and the 25th stamp, that’s fine by me.
I ordered a brand-new complete set of the holo McDonalds cards (good price, good seller) and it is literally the worst printing I’ve seen in the hobby so far. Quite a lot of whitening and many holo ‘specks’ poking through on the backs.
If you want these for a binder go for it!
But I would 100% avoid if you intend to grade.
While it’s possible there were some good batches printed, it turns out that cards explicitly aimed at children (happy meal) can have very little regard for quality-control. Funny how that works.
And of course I’m only speaking for this release. I can’t speak towards previous McDonald’s release (English or Japanese).
It’s so easy to be negative and say “yeah well of course what did you expect?” But I figured if this helps anyone that was curious, great.
McDonald’s sets have typically all had issues like this as they’re often not handled very well and placed next to hot food. That’s usually not much of a concern though as they don’t really tend to hold value beyond their inception period - I’d say if you want to grade these cards you should probably wait a year or two for their prices to fall first, then you can buy them cheaply in bulk. Although at that point graded copies will likely hold little value anyway.
Of course I can’t predict the future, but people usually don’t seem to care much for older anniversary-related or McDonald’s items after the event, and the McDonald’s set isn’t even the primary anniversary set to begin with.
If I was going after this set I’d keep it in a binder.
That’s interesting, I was hoping/expecting these to be in better quality since they are finally packing the cards in “proper” packaging.
The last McDonalds distribution I collected was the one in 2018. I tried to get some cards I liked from that one, simply for the personal collection. On top of terrible printing quality, pretty similar to your issues, so whitening, corner knicks, centering issues etc… there was one overarching issue:
The cards were packaged directly together with the happy meal toys. It wasn’t uncommon to get a card with a major dent from like a Fennekin’s ear which was poking deeply into the center of your card.
Oh well, all in all, I ended up getting a PSA worthy Psyduck which I sent in, and it is currently still a pop 1 in PSA 10. Guess that is exactly what made it fun: the challenge to go out, visit different McDonalds, and try and achieve something hard to obtain.
10s will probably hold some value long-term due to the difficulty. I’m just saying good luck trying to grade for a 10 yourself if what I just experienced is a general indication of the print quality. Literally the worst I’ve personally seen so far.
I can second this. There is no sense of consistency between cards.
holo bleeds
weirdly cut corners
holo specs that look like scratches showing through brand new cards
color saturation
I picked up the set because I think it’s cool, but the print quality is very low. I suspect they cut corners in order to keep up with demand. The non-holos look way better than the holos in my opinion. If you just like the artwork, I would suggest getting those.
the cards that I got out of a sealed case are fine, some have minor whitening, but I would say 40% are PSA 10 quality.
Keep in mind that these listings of complete sets mostly consist of the weakest copies the seller wants to get rid off.
I’ve noticed a lot of newer product seems to be sufferring from rough print quality. Those are bad, but even some Shining Fates I’ve seen seems to be pretty off in comparison to some older sets like HF, Cosmic Eclipse, etc.
The ones I got (directly from buying happy meals, not eBay) were in good shape. I had near to no whitening at all, no scratches, decent centering. I’ve gotten about 15 of them so far.
My holo Pikachu has some weird bleeding over the front itself, many little holofoil “dots”. not sure if it’s an error or small spots where the ink evaporated
There’s a theory (which could very well be nonsense) that exposure to high temperatures is what causes holo bleed. This is very common amongst McDonald’s releases which are typically cards placed near to hot food. Whether there’s any merit to that theory though I do not know, it could just be coincidence.
which sets did you say were the absolute worst? 
