Identification Help Please

[drstater]

Hi, all! I'm new to Pokemon and picked these up at a yard sale recently. They look like store displays where cellophane packs of cards were glued to the cardboard in six rows of six. The top card in every pack is clear. Any ID or value help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[donavannj]

Hi, all! I'm new to Pokemon and picked these up at a yard sale recently. They look like store displays where cellophane packs of cards were glued to the cardboard in six rows of six. The top card in every pack is clear. Any ID or value help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Counterfeit merch. If you'd like, I can list off all of the tells so you can be better at spotting these in the future.

 

[drstater]

Thanks for the quick reply. Are these counterfeits pretty common? Approximately what year were they produced?

 

[drstater]

Oh, and a list of tells would be very helpful. Thanks!

 

[donavannj]

Thanks for the quick reply. Are these counterfeits pretty common? Approximately what year were they produced?

I've never seen these particular counterfeits before, but I'm thinking they were produced sometime between 2002 and 2006, given that the do use discolored images of Pokemon that were released in the games Pokemon Ruby & Pokemon Sapphire, which was released in Fall 2002 in Japan, Spring 2003 in Europe and America, and Summer 2003 for Australia.

Oh, and a list of tells would be very helpful. Thanks!

So, tells that stand out from image one:

• The top of the packgage actually contains a Digimon rather than a Pokemon (it's the one with purple fringes on its ears and a red triangle on its forehead)
• The cards have no copyright date.
• The cards have HPs that do not end with a "0"
• The cards look to be of very poor print quality
• the cards have square edges. Official Pokemon cards have round edges in 99% of cases
• The box has the "Pokemon" logo tucked away in a corner on the top flap rather than being prominently displayed on the front of the box
• I think the language on those cards might actually be Chinese, not Japanese (generally an overlapping set of characters so it can be hard to tell).
• The box has terrible print quality and the pokemon featured on it (staryu and Marshtomp) are discolored
• Most of the cards appear to have too dark of coloring
• The top of the package does not have the "Pokemon" log anywhere on it

Image 2:

• All the complaints from image one
• Seriously, it's even more apparent the coloring is off.
• The cards are all individually shrink wrapped. Shrink wrapping cards individually (or even at all) is just simply not a thing for Pokemon. There are many that are individually packaged in cellophane wrapping, but that wrapping is definitely not tight to the card on all sides and actually has some flaps you can tear at to open it. The ones in this picture do not have those.
  
  Image 3:
• The card back look way, way too dark. Like almost black in some spots.
• And now i see that the wrapping is supposed to act like a "booster pack". Thing with booster packs is that official ones actually use foil packaging to wrap the cards, not cellophane, and each official pack actually has the Pokemon logo as well as the series of cards they are from printed on the front. Also all of the copyright information on the back side of the pack. All of the stuff an official booster pack needs is missing.
  
  There's also more that looks wrong, but is difficult to explain as it's much more subtle stuff.

 

[drstater]

You're the best, thanks! Seriously, I appreciate your effort to educate a newby!