“Prismatic Evolutions Super-Premium Collection” Product Images Revealed!

[fauxplants]

Nerd Time.

The downgrade is the result of english cards being on half as many offset embossing rollers compared to Japanese cards. Its an effective cost cutting method for millennium print group of North Carolina. They have to print for all English speaking countries including Singapore even though they also get simplified and traditional Chinese cards now form Japan. Being cheaper to produce means dramatically faster production time, they can get cards processed for make ready in half the time Japanese cards take. Even with these cutbacks, MPG NC cannot maintain capacity, they are trying but struggling.

Gen 6 cards for English and Japanese both had the same texturing depth and patterns. This was the point at which MPG if NC could keep up with demand for English speaking countries. By gen 7 demand was quickly outpacing production, so they cut the texturing back to 80% of Japan but still kept the same patterns. Gen 8 cut it back even more to 70% and altered the patterns to be a bit more simplified, and Gen 9 is half the depth of Japanese textured cards with half the patterns.

If mpg can’t keep up with the demand im afraid gen 10 won’t even be textured or have patterns at all, they will go back to the cheap striped holo patterns from black and white era. I really hope that doesn’t happen.

a bit skeptical of some of the details here... i have the alakazam ex secret rare from awakening psychic king and the texture looks much finer than its english counterpart, not really different from the cards today. when textured full arts first came out though, japanese texture was insanely blinding and english textures were oftentimes a completely different pattern so i can confirm that.

also regarding the embossing rollers, i'm not sure if that's how the texture is really printed. it seems like it's printed on with clear UV ink, which would make more sense since the parameters can be seemingly more easily adjusted to print different patterns for different cards in different orders to mix up the cards during production and avoid batching issues. It would make more sense still if english texture was less detailed than japanese in order to reduce print times and save on clear UV ink since it is very expensive. on top of english MPG also has to print for all other western languages (excluding portuguese) like spanish, french, italian etc so yeah it's a lot....

I doubt we will be losing texture anytime soon, if anything we are getting more than ever in prismatic with all the pokeball and masterball holos that are insanely easy to pull. tpci is more than capable of expanding capacity in other ways like buying more factories in other regions to help with printing demand like they did during covid. with the prices ppl are ok with paying for a pack of cards now (calling $5-$7 packs a "good deal" from resellers and even some retailers,) i am 99.9% sure that pokemon will raise msrp per pack again to like $5 with the release of ZA card sets to compensate for expansion and printing costs, like they did with SV with the increase from $4 to $4.50 a pack for the first time in history to my knowledge. that time was probably to help recoup the funds from expansion during the covid boom.

 

[fauxplants]

I can't believe I would EVER say this EVER, BUT... I want to see what happens if someone gets murdered in cold blood over these UPCs just so that TPCI will FINALLY pull their heads out of their capitalistic asses and see how much damage they're causing just from this set. Maybe then, they'll actually do something about the printing and quantity of products

i hope the bad press from prismatic and blooming waters is enough for them to consider an extended reprint of the sets (let's be real they probably already are like with xy evolutions and shining fates.) god forbid any significant harm is involved but sadly it might come to that point anyway....