Do you grade any vintage Pokémon cards? 0

[rarecardcollector80126]

Sent in some cards that look like this

do you grade these?

[PaulS.]

No, sorry. None of those are TCG so we will not grade them.

 

Paul

[PichuCollector]

On 3/6/2021 at 7:21 PM, rarecardcollector80126 said:

I'm afraid to say that this is a "fake". I put that in quotes because it's actually a real card but what is displayed on the front is not original - it's had the real design printed over.

The real card as you can probably imagine is part of Bandai's officially licensed Pokémon Anime Collection which ran from early 1998 to late 2000. These cards depicted scenes from the anime and on the back it repeats the image which should be displayed on the front and gives a brief overview of what was going on in the scene. This particular card is number 103 and would have likely been part of the 2nd or 3rd release (mid-late 1998).

These fakes I believe almost all originate from China and are almost as old as the original cards themselves - these were distributed to the US and were commonly available in unofficial Pokémon-branded vending machines which also awarded a whole assortment of other fake cards. You see all sorts of different fake versions of these cards, from non-holofoil cards given holofoil treatment (which other companies have blindly graded in the past) to weird and wonderful complete design replacements like on your card here.

I've attached an image of what the front of this card should look like - they've printed over the front of it with imagery which I believe is from one of the early Pikachu Records CDs overlaid on a very bizarre holofoil effect.