The Most Valuable Pokemon Card Mistakes

It's easy to make mistakes. Everyone does! Of course, the same is true when it comes to the Pokemon TCG. With over two billion cards printed, error cards are now easier than ever.

His it's definitely worth checking those pokemon cards piled up in your closet – one or two of them might have a minor glitch, and the fun thing about bug cards is that the range of bugs is almost endless and each bug card is unique.

Updated October 30, 2024, Ryan Hay: More and more Pokémon TCG cards are being released all the time, and with more cards than ever before in players' hands, you know they'll be more critical than ever about the cards they open. There are some more common printing errors, such as crimping, while others are still quite rare, such as printing the artwork twice on the card. If you're interested in having one, check out these unique cards.

16 Misspelled cards

Many typos

With over a thousand Pokemon, remembering how to spell them all can be a real test. Xerneas? Exeggcute? Get out of here. Apparently the Pokémon Company people suffer from it too. Pokemon, moves, tags, and illustrators were misspelled. Examples include…

• Nintendo
• Fanphy
• Team Mamga
• Psyduck
• Dark Exeggcutor

…but rest assured there are many, many more. Most of them can be picked up for a few bucks online, though the Ancient Mew that sounds “Nintedo” can be a bit pricey. However, be careful with incorrectly written cards, as they can also indicate a fake.

15 Shuffle the cards

It's hard to find the right lines

Miscut cards are just that — miscut. The cards are printed on a large scale. The card sheets, which are (usually) 11 x 11, are cut into individuals at the factory, but therein lies the risk of human error. Sometimes the cards may be slightly misaligned before splitting, resulting in cards with thicker or thinner edges than usual.

These are some of the more common error cards, but as you can imagine, cards with significantly more disproportionate limits are often worth more. Most miscuts are just minor misalignments, with the card sheet sliding slightly as you cut. Other times it can be more serious, like with Okidogi EX, which has part of a completely different card on it.

14 Blank cards

Surprise! It's nothing

No, it's not a full-art Reshiram (Vast White Pokémon!) on a snowy day. That's a pretty extreme typo. Sometimes the front of the card doesn't print correctly, resulting in a completely blank card!

What's more, sometimes these cards still retain their holographic foil, resulting in a bright white card. These cards are quite a hot commodity in the bug card hunting community, so fans will want to keep their eyes peeled.

13 A preview of Raich

The rumor turned into reality

Prerelease cards are special cards that are stamped with “PRERELEASE” or an expansion logo to promote a new set, often given out at special events. Legend has it that during the printing of the prerelease Jungle Clefable card, a certain number of Base Set Raichus ran out of stamp, and thus the elusive Prerelease Raichu was born.

This card was just a hint of rumor for years. But in recent times, at least two confirmed copies have been verified by CGC Cards. The exact number of copies released into the wild by early Pokémon TCG fans is unknown, but is believed to be in the low double digits. Two confirmed copies of Prerelease Raich have been verified by David Persin, who owns the most complete collection of English Pokémon in the world, and former employees of Wizards of the Coast, the game's original publisher.

12 Magic: The Gathering x Pokemon

A partnership made in cards

Very early in the series, a small set of cards were printed with the wrong backing. Both Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering were developed by the same company — Wizards of The Coast.

Evidently, somewhere along the line, Wizards used Magic: The Gathering cards to print some Pokemon test cards. Only a few cards have been officially certified as genuine (Blastoise, Arcanine, and Growlith, all selling for nice pocket change), but there are photos of Growlithe and Arcanine cards with the same flaw.

Other interesting points about this card include the small lightning bolt next to Blastoise's HP and the use of a different font than the one we all know and love. Due to its scarcity, this card could equal Prerelease Raichu in price.

Only found in theaters

During the time the first Pokemon movie was in theaters, special promo cards were given out to anyone who bought a ticket. These cards were Mewtwo, Electabuzz, Pikachu and Dragonite. Each was stamped with a gold “Pokémon: The First Movie” stamp in the upper right corner of the artwork.

For some reason a few of them flipped over during stamping and ended up with the logo on the bottom left of the card instead. While everyone on the schoolyard seemed to have one of the promos, a card with an inverted stamp error is very rare and can fetch up to several hundred dollars on eBay.

10 For position only

Unique font

Like most products, Pokemon cards are put through a trial run before they are mass produced and sold to the public. Obviously, these test cards won't be able to be sold, so it's important to mark them in some way, shape or form that says “don't sell me”.

“For Position Only” works fine, right? Nobody's going to want these cards with big, ugly white text over the face of their favorite seven-foot nightmare cobra, right? Right? More than 100 of these cards escaped the dump and appeared on eBay and Pokemon TCG collectibles, all with a price tag that might require a loan.

9 Badly set Holos

Slightly shifted

Similar to miscut cards, misaligned holographic cards occur when the holographic foil shifts slightly during printing, creating a 3D or cut-out effect like the Fossil Articuno card pictured.

Misaligned holo cards are somewhat closer in value to faulty pieces than 'For Position Only' cards, but they aren't cheap. Like miscut cards, misaligned holos have more value based on how misaligned they are. Note that this error is most common on older Wizards of The Coast E-series cards.

8 Double printing of cards

Two for the price of one

On extremely rare occasions, the card sheet will be sent twice. When this happens, the probability that it will cause some extraordinary errors is very high.

That's exactly what we're looking at with this quirky stamp. On the top half of the card is Feraligatr. At the bottom is Professor Oak's New Theory. Both of these cards are in Portuguese, so if you're having trouble deciphering the text, that's why. This very rare bug may not come around very often, but it sure is a collector's delight.

7 Holo Bleed cards

Going back to the more accessible style of glitch cards, we have the violent sounding Holographic Bleed cards. 'Bleed' here refers to the fact that the holographic effect 'seeps' into an area of ​​the card that is not normally holographic. See? That's not so bad.

If there is an error most likely in one's collection, it is a bleed or miscut. As with most of the other cards on this list, the error rate is what determines the value of your card (also, if there's a big orange lizard on it, it's probably worth a few cents regardless).

6 Extended copyright

Lasts a long time

There are a fantastic number of textual errors in the TCG – often minor grammatical errors or omitted words, but occasionally something wonderful happens. Sometimes the higher ranks in Wizards will use their power to ensure that their seemingly favorite card, Dark Arbok, remains their intellectual property for the next 21,000 years.

I mean, that is pretty snazzy – one of Arita's best illustrations, for sure. We're no experts on the legal system, but we strongly suspect that this case wouldn't hold up in court around 21,977 AD.

This is an unusual typo on Dark Arbok cards that anyone could have gotten for $25 online. Still, it's a great addition to any collection.

5 Flipped back

Just flip it over

One of the weirdest misprints you may encounter in your Pokemon Trading Cards are the upside down ones. There aren't many cards that feature flip backs, but POP Series 5 Mew and DP Promo Shinx are common culprits.

In theory, this could happen with any Pokémon card print, all it would take is a mis-inserted sheet into the printer and then slip through quality control, and you'd have a whole new set of reversed cards.

4 Ink stains

It doesn't wash off

Sometimes things just don't print right. We all know that pain, right? Printers are the bane of every household's existence – they just never seem to work when needed.

So it's no big surprise that Pokemon card printing comes with a few bugs as well. Ink spotting is common – it's different from the other printing errors we've mentioned, as you can see in the Haunter card shown above.

The ink, usually on the Pokemon image, will smear, color the card wrong, be placed where it shouldn't be, etc. Lots of cards have had little mistakes like this over the years, but they're still uncommon enough to make you a buck. pretty penny

3 Incorrect or missing HP

Just a little off

Often the information on the cards is printed incorrectly or in rare cases not at all. To be fair, there are a lot of cards to keep track of with a lot of text! They usually get it right.

However, the HPs on Pokemon cards have been misprinted more than once. The most famous example is the Dark Persian card. A significant number of them were printed entirely without HP. While we're out here, though, we bet at least a few school kids tried to convince their Pokémon TCG rivals that this meant Dark Persian was immortal.

2 Crimping

It feels neat

Crimping is one of the most common mistakes you can find in all Pokemon TCG sets. This particular error occurs when inserting cards into a deck.

If the top or bottom of the card protrudes from the pack, it can get caught in the sealing process. This creates a unique texture on the card reminiscent of the curling process that closes each pack. This type of misprint isn't usually worth a ton of extra value, it's mostly just a fascinating insight into the packaging process behind Pokemon cards.

1 Image errors

Big and small mistakes

Image defects are things that don't fall into other categories; apart from that fake picture everything is fine with them. It's not necessarily a fault of the printing process – it's like someone just got a bad JPG or something. In some cases, you would barely notice the difference if you weren't aware of it.

This is definitely true of the Pikachu image above, which has red cheeks – they should actually be yellow. Unsurprisingly, Pikachu is such a popular Pokemon, so misprints of these cards can be especially valuable.