Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

Noble Victories - Card condition & randomness

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AyameHikaru

AyameHikaru

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As we come up on the second Prerelease weekend, I wanted to point out/ask about a few things I discovered last weekend.

First - Card condition. Specifically the Secret Rare of the set, but also all the Full Art cards. I watched quite a few of these be pulled, and I have to say, getting gem mints of these is NOT going to be easy. I got the chance to look at 7 of the Meowth over the course of the day, and all seven had significant edge wear. Four of these I actually watched pulled from the pack and examined them directly afterward. The edges look choppy, worn, almost frayed. It's not quite as all-consuming on the Full Art cards, but I did see several of them pulled fresh with bad edges, as well.
There are a lot of collectors who collect sets with as perfect cards as they can get. (Waynegg being a good example.) Considering that the Meowth has the lowest pull rate of any card in the set, about 1 in every 3-4 boxes, it's going to be very, very difficult to not only find people with the card and willing to trade, but find a good condition one! (If there even are any good condition Meowths...) If my prerelease is any indicator of the condition of the rest of the cards, there are going to be a lot of mad collectors.

Second - Randomization/print runs. I had a rather freaky thing happen last weekend. Another Professor and I sat down and opened up 2 boxes, 1 each. And we noticed.... we were pulling a lot of the same cards. A LOT of the same cards. I know how it's supposed to work, with the print run preventing exactly the sort of thing we encountered: two boxes that were basically identical. A few packs at the start and end were off, but most were the same. To make my point:

We both pulled a Full Art Virizion from the right side of our boxes.
We both pulled a Full Art Terrakion from the left side of our boxes.
We both pulled 1 normal Kyurem, one RH Kyurem.
We both pulled 1 normal Hydreigon, one RH Hydreigon.
We both pulled 1 Ability Conkeldurr.
We both pulled 2 Ability Victini.
We both pulled 1 Psychic Victini.
We both pulled 2 Vanilluxe.
We both pulled 1 Jellicent.
We both pulled 1 Eelektross.
We both pulled 1 RH N.
We both pulled 1 RH Xtransceiver.
We both pulled 1 RH Super Rod.
We both pulled 1 RH Yamask (Ambush).
We both pulled 1 RH Petilil.
We both pulled 1 RH Meinfoo.
We both pulled 1 RH Shelmet.

And more. To clarify, these boxes were side by side in the case. There's no way the boxes should have been that similar.

I would just like to know if anyone else has seen either one of these problems pop up at their prerelease (or will see tomorrow, anyway) to know just how widespread they are. Particularly whether or not anyone finds any Meowths that are actually in gem mint condition. Thanks for reading!
 
Condition issue is annoying.

I wouldn't complain about the similarity of those boxes, sounds like they were pretty good. Interesting, though.
 
This is somewhat related to this... there were LOTS of miscut cards, mostly reverse holos, opened at our prerelease. My girlfriend and I together opened 6 miscut reverse holos, and we saw many, many others.
 
It seems that there are always problems with the prerelease packs. I do hope this is not a problem because I like to trust the condition of cards from pack for my collection because I very picky about what I put in them.
 
I opened about 10 packs today and of the 10 only got 1 holo, (fire Victini)

It seems the odds are pretty bad of pulling anything decent or the good packs are stacked together in the boxes, which might of been the case seeing how that prerelease went in the tourney.
 
Very interesting.
Haha, looking through the list I actually pulled a decent amount of the same cards from just my 8 packs, though I'm sure that is a coincidence.
In terms of clumped good cards, I didn't get single disappointing pack in my original six, while those beside me got mostly bad cards.
Haha I doubt I'm helping I'm sorry
Just posting observations
 
todays prerelease I thought I got the bad end of the stick, the best card I pulled was fire Victini (which btw is on ebay in my link)

I think the Fire Vicitini has potential to some degree, doubtful its going to be used though given the requirements.

couldnt get any Kyeroums (spelling?) for nothing.

I think I pulled like 3 of those darn fossils out of 6 packs, (same fossil BTW)

odds of pulling a rare holofoil use to be 1:3

today it was 1:9

But 2-3 of the Reverse Holos was rares.
 
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My friend pulled a Meowth and it looked terrible. I pulled a FA Victini and it looks good though.
 
My friend pulled a mea=owth, and it isnt worn or torn at all...I also pulled 2 Victini FA in 2 packs in a row, they are in awesome condition.
 
All the cards in our area seemed to be fine in condition, and randomised equally.
One person in about 2 or 3 boxes got meowth, and his was in mint condition.
 
I pulled a meowth and noticed the edges looked beat up too. That's really weird.
Posted with Mobile style...
 
Weird. My brother's Meowth looks just fine; just like any other card. I pulled FA Fliptini today, and it also looks fine.
 
MY friend's Meowth had the same foil showing through. Also, my FA N had a line on the right hand side that was very faint. It was not impressed onto the card, rather it appeared to be under the top layer. The collation was horrible, I know that for sure. We did a draft afterward, and I got 5 durant at a table of 7 ppl. And I didn't crack a single holo rare in any of those packs. Hopefully the packs at Target/wal-mart/Toys-r-Us and shops won't have these problems. One good thing I can say is that the FA pull rate was 3-4 per box.
 
I can agree that I pulled the same cards as the OP.

At our Prerelease, 3 Meowth were pulled- none were as bad as Jwittz's corner damage, but each was edgewear'd to a point where the foil was visible along the edges on each one.
 
The Meowth I saw had the same edgewear/visible foil issue everyone is talking about.

On the plus side, I haven't seen anything wrong with any FA cards, the good Trainers (N, Eviolite, Rocky Helmet, Super Rod) seem easy to get (no 2 per box horror stories like with Catcher), and I haven't noticed any of the rares as being especially hard to pull.
 
We had a newly opened box at our league, there was 1 pack facing the wrong way round in it.

It was a meowth.

Maybe it was coincidence but...eh?
 
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