CGC Trading Cards Grades Rare Double-printed Pokémon Cards from Test Print Sheet

CGC Trading Cards® is thrilled to have certified an amazing group of Pokémon test print cards from the Wizards of the Coast (WotC) era. The cards were professionally cut from an uncut "Make Ready" sheet, which sold for $35,000 in a Rare Candy Auctions sale in November 2022. Several examples of the individually cut cards are shown below.

The Make Ready Test Sheet before it was cut into individual cards. Each individual card is graded in order from left to right, going from top to bottom and pedigreed to its axis number. Click images to enlarge.

Make Ready trading card sheets are test prints that are printed on whatever scrap sheets are lying around in the factory. They are typically used to test the alignment of the printing plates. In this case, the press worker grabbed a sheet that had already been printed with trading card designs for the Power Reserve and Water Blast Pokémon TCG theme decks. The factory then printed over that sheet with common and uncommon cards from the Fossil expansion, leaving the beautiful disaster shown above.

An uncut Power Reserve / Water Blast Theme Deck Sheet without yellow borders (left) and an uncut Fossil Common / Uncommon sheet (right). Images courtesy of https://pokemuseum.weebly.com/uncut-sheets. Click images to enlarge.

The combination of the cards from the two above sheets created a third, unique sheet! Some collectors may find it distressing that the sheet — which, in itself, is a valuable collectible — was cut up this way. However, the practice of cutting a large sheet to make smaller, more affordable collectibles is common. For example, the wing fabric from the first Wright Flyer that was carried to the moon by Neil Armstrong was cut into smaller sections by a NASA seamstress. Those pieces of the wing fabric were certified by CGC Trading Cards' affiliate Collectibles Authentication Guaranty® (CAG®) and have since realized impressive prices at auction. Learn more about it here.

An Omastar // Seel, Pokémon (1999) Make Ready Test Sheet - 40 // 41 Fossil // Water Blast Theme Deck graded CGC 9 and pedigreed as Sheet Position B10 (left), and a Magmar // Fighting Energy, Pokémon (1999) Make Ready Test Sheet - 39 // 97 Fossil // Water Blast Theme Deck graded CGC 8.5 and pedigreed as Sheet Position H6 (right) Click images to enlarge.

In this case, the sheet held 121 individual cards. CGC Trading Cards agreed to grade the test print cards individually only if the submitter had the sheet cut professionally. Additionally, CGC Trading Cards' expert graders felt it would be best if each card was numbered corresponding to where on the sheet it was cut from. For this reason, the Make Ready sheet was graded in order from left to right, going from top to bottom. Each card is pedigreed to its specific location on the original sheet.

Click images to enlarge.

Interestingly, each card combination on the sheet is unique, aside from only two repeating cards: two Golem // Grass Energy in positions H1 and H2.

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