Cards sold as prototypes from the Pokemon TCG's 1995 and 1996 development were shown, in January 2025, to carry printer tracking dots encoding a print date of 2024. The evidence came from the yellow dots that colour printers embed in everything they produce, decoded by a collector who owned some of the cards himself. More than $10 million of these cards had already changed hands at auction.
What were the playtest cards supposed to be?
They were presented as surviving artefacts from the period when the trading card game was still being designed, before Base Set existed. Collectors sorted them into groups by apparent stage of development, labelled Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma, along with presentation versions. They began appearing at public auction in 2024, and individual cards sold for anywhere from four to six figures depending on the variant and how popular the Pokemon was.
The cards were traced to Takumi Akabane, an early figure in the game's development, who was involved in authenticating them. Who actually printed the cards that carry 2024 dots has not been publicly established, and it is worth keeping those two things separate.
How did anyone work out they were printed in 2024?
On 27 January 2025 a collector posting as PKMNFlyingMaster published an analysis on the Elite Fourum board. He owned affected cards and has said he lost thousands of dollars when the work he published devalued his own collection.
The method uses machine identification codes. Since the 1990s, colour laser printers and copiers have embedded a faint pattern of yellow dots across every page they output, encoding the machine's serial number and the date and time of printing. The dots are close to invisible against white, which is the point. The scheme used by Xerox DocuColor machines was decoded publicly in 2005, and a community member building on that work produced a decoder others could use.
Why do the yellow dots prove anything?
This is the part that does the real work, and it is worth understanding before the dates.
Pokemon cards are printed on industrial offset presses. So are magazines, including the CoroCoro issues the earliest promos came from. Offset presses do not embed machine identification codes at all. The technology exists to trace documents back to a specific office printer, and it was never present in commercial card production.
So the dots do not merely date a card. Their presence at all says the object came off an office or home colour printer rather than a press. For a card claimed to predate Base Set, that is the finding, before anyone reads a year off the grid.
What did the dots actually say?
The Xerox pattern is a repeating grid, fifteen columns by eight rows, in which one column encodes the year. Read against that scheme, 2024 appears as a specific binary sequence, and it appeared consistently.
The findings split by variant:
- Low-quality Beta cards - every copy examined carried 2024 dots, and the printer serial numbers matched each other.
- Alpha cards - a different dot pattern, consistent with a Konica Minolta or Epson machine rather than a Xerox, possibly manufactured around 2016.
- Some Alpha cards - both patterns present at once, which points at genuine older material being scanned and reprinted in 2024.
- High-quality Beta cards - no dots observed, with a claim of traces of the Alpha pattern.
What has CGC done about it?
CGC had graded and authenticated a number of these cards without publishing the methodology it used, which was itself a point of criticism in the community. After the analysis appeared, the company issued a statement saying it was investigating the claims, that the cards in question represent less than 0.03% of everything it has graded, and that it requires affected cards be returned to its headquarters for analysis. It has said it is looking at refunds for buyers who hold a card verifiably printed in 2024.
What is still unresolved?
Quite a lot, and anyone telling you the story is closed is ahead of the evidence.
The high-quality Alpha cards have not been settled. The Beta presentation cards have not been analysed at high resolution, so nothing is known either way. The Gamma cards sit awkwardly because their artwork does not correspond to cards that were ever released. And CGC has not published the standard it originally authenticated against, so there is no way to check that reasoning from outside.
What should a collector take from this?
The useful lesson is not about prototypes specifically. It is that provenance attached to a respected name is not the same as physical evidence, and a grading label is a company's opinion rather than a proof.
The dots worked as evidence because they are a property of the object that nobody involved in selling it controlled or thought to check. When you are looking at something expensive and unusual, the question worth asking is which of its properties could not have been arranged by the seller. That is a better filter than any story about where a card came from.