Updated 4/20/2023: The Pokemon Company provided TheGamer the followꦬing state✨ment with regards to the alleged theft:
“We take the protection of our IP and associated products very seriously. This matter remains under investigation and we cannot comment on details at this time. However, we can confirm that Sword & Shield booster packs and products were shipped to retail as intended and we have no indication that the integrity of the products were impacted by any confirmed or unconfirmed theft. Furthermore, we continue to significantly invest in both the production and security of our TCG business. We value the faith our fans put in us and our products, and these investments are intended to help us continue to maintain their trust.”
If you follow Pokemon TCG news at all, you’ve likely heard that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:someone stol𝐆e a whole mess of Fusion Strike cards and tried to sell them to a local🃏 game store in Texas. A photo depicting tens of thousands of chase cards from the set piled on a table landed on the PokemonTCG subreddit over the weekend, causing quite a stir in the community. The store in question, Dallas’ Trading Card World, released a statement the following day explaining that the cards were brought to them by someone that worked at Pokemon’s printing facility, and that The Pokemon Company was contacted and recovered the product.
It wasn’t long before more photos started appearing featuring other Pokemon TCG sets. One featured piles of the two highest-value cards from the Evolving Skies expansion in the lap of someone dressed identical to the person in the Fusion Strike pho♓to. On Tuesday, a video was posted on Instagram that shows an 800-count from Fusion Strike.
Beyond TCW’s statement, we don’t know anything about when these photos were taken, how the cards were procured, or what The Pokemon Company did about it, a꧙nd we never will. There’s a lot of conflicting stories and misinformation going around, but based on what we know the best guess is that one or more people working at Millennium Print Group as quality assurance technicians was marking chase cards as defective, pulling them off the line, then smuggling the cards out to sell later. If that’s the case - which is likely, due to the sheer number of cards - every one of those cards would have been reprinted and inserted into packs. A lot of people are worried that this thief was affecting pull rates, but that’s highly unlikely.
But we’ll never know, and that’s the problem. Fusion Strike had notoriously bad pull rates, and it’s easy to see why people are making a leap here and assuming this is why. As more photos of large piles of hits come out - whether stolen, counterfeited, or simply faked now that there’s attention to be had - the outrage is only going to get worse. It already felt terrible to open hu🍃ndreds of Evolving Skies packs and never find a Moonbreon - trust me I know - and now it feels even worse because there’s a chance the packs you opened were meant to have hits in▨ them.
This is not an isolated incident. The bဣacklash and outrage is a culmination of years of built up resentment that began during the pandemic when Pokemon failed to print enough product to meet demand, and grew as expansion after expansion exhibited abysmal pull rates. That, along with the company’s unwilไlingness to communicate directly and transparently with its customers, has created a perfect storm, and people are only going to get more agitated as more photos like this crop up.
It’s clear that the original Fusion Strike incident that kicked off this drama happened a long time ago. TCW’s sequence of events indicate that it worked with Pokemon and that it resolved the matter internally, meaning this whole thing was over and done with a long time ago - likely around the time that Fusion Strike launched in September 2021. The Pokemon Company never made a statement about this situation, never revealed how it happened or what measures were taken to stop it from happening again. It never told customers that they didn’t have to worry about the theft affecting pull rates, if that’s even the case. It made no effort to be transparent with people, so it's no wonder that everyone is freaking out about it now.
Whether this heist affected the pull rates or not is moot at this point. Nothing short of a full declassification from Pokemon will quell the betrayal people feel, and ev🌃en then there will still be questions and doubts. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to open a pack without wondering if someone somewhere slipped a card out of it that was supposed to be mine, and that uncertainty makes me a lot ꦯless excited to open packs of Pokemon cards.