It exists for an unglamorous reason: the year changed. Wizards updated the copyright on the printing plate and kept running Base Set, which by then had been in continuous production alongside Jungle, Fossil and Team Rocket. Dated press sheets put the plates at February 2000.
It is the last and smallest English Base Set run — and for roughly twenty years the grading companies did not recognise it, filing these cards under plain Unlimited. PSA only began labelling the variant in March 2021. That single fact is why the published population numbers for this printing are far lower than any other Base Set run, and it is why they should be read as a floor rather than a count.
This guide covers the 1999–2000 printing specifically: why it exists, how to tell it from Unlimited — the printing it is most often confused with — what actually counts as a 1999–2000 card, how much of it was made, which cards carry the value, and why its population figures need a caveat attached.
Why This Printing Exists
There is no design story here, and that is the honest answer. This printing is what a calendar rollover looks like on a printing press.
By late 1999 Base Set had been running for the better part of a year. Wizards was printing it continuously — alongside Jungle, Fossil and Team Rocket, all of them in production at the same time — and it kept rolling into 2000. When the year changed, the copyright notice on the card had to change with it, so the plate was updated: ©1999 became ©1999–2000.
That is the entire difference. No new artwork, no new layout, no new border, no stamp. The same 102 cards, off a re-cut plate, with one line of legal text edited.
The plated evidence
Because the difference is so slight, the print date matters more here than on any other Base Set printing, and unusually we have it. Wizards-era press sheets carry sign-off forms with job numbers, and collectors have catalogued them. Base Set sheets for this run are stamped with a February 2000 black-plate date — job P06033-110, signed off in March 2000, printed by GPS Colour Graphics in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
That is the hardest production date anywhere in the Base Set story: the earliest runs are dated only by inference and uncontested ranges, while this one has actual signed press sheets. It also settles something collectors argue about — the “UK print” was a Northern Irish press, not an English one.
Two errors the new plate quietly fixed
The rollover plate did not only change the year. Two long-standing card errors were corrected at the same time, which gives collectors independent, verifiable markers that travel with this printing:
- Vulpix #68 — the HP value had read “HP 50” instead of “50 HP” since the very first print. The 1999–2000 plate corrects it. A Vulpix reading “50 HP” is itself a tell that you are holding this printing.
- Slowpoke #67 — the illustrator credit had been misspelt “Miki Takano” on earlier runs. The 1999–2000 plate corrects it to Miki Tanaka.
How to Tell a 1999–2000 Card
This is the hardest identification job in Base Set, and the reason is simple: this printing and Unlimited look the same. Both carry the drop shadow. Both have the bold HP text. Both have identical artwork and borders.
So the shadow — the tell that settles practically every other Base Set question — is useless here. You have to read the card.
The copyright line has two halves, and only one of them matters
The line at the bottom of every Base Set card is two separate copyright statements, and they change at different times:
| Printing | Part 1 — Nintendo line | Part 2 — Wizards line |
|---|---|---|
| 1st Edition | ©1995, 96, 98, 99 | ©1999 |
| Shadowless | ©1995, 96, 98, 99 | ©1999 |
| Unlimited | ©1995, 96, 98 | ©1999 |
| 1999–2000 | ©1995, 96, 98 | ©1999–2000 |
Read that table across, not down. Unlimited and the 1999–2000 print have identical Nintendo halves — both drop the “99”. The only difference between them is the Wizards half gaining “–2000”.
The two “extra years” — the trap underneath all of this
Here is why this trips up so many collectors, and so many guides. Two different printings each have an “extra year” in the copyright line, and they are in different halves of the line.
Shadowless carries an extra “99” in the Nintendo half. The 1999–2000 print carries an extra “–2000” in the Wizards half. They are unrelated facts that both read as “one more number.” A guide that says “the extra year tells you which printing you have” without saying which year, in which half will be wrong half the time — and that is the single most common mistake in circulation.
The practical order of checks
- A stamp? Then it is 1st Edition, with one exception: Machamp #8, which is covered below.
- No stamp, no drop shadow? Then it is Shadowless, and its Nintendo half will read ©1995, 96, 98, 99.
- No stamp, with drop shadow? You are holding either Unlimited or the 1999–2000 print, and only the Wizards half will settle it: ©1999 is Unlimited, ©1999–2000 is this printing.
- Trainer or Energy card? There is no artwork window, so no shadow and no HP to compare. The copyright line is the only test that exists — which is also why it is worth training your eye on it rather than on the shadow.
Packs and boxes
Product-level identification is easier than card-level, because more changed on the packaging than on the cards. Wizards switched from its rectangular logo to an arched one in October 1999, so an arched logo on an English box points at the later run. 1999–2000 packs carry a “1999–2000” legal line. And there is one genuinely useful shortcut: some UK packs were distributed into Poland by applying a sticker to an English pack rather than printing a Polish-language pack, so a British pack with a Polish info label is a known route to this printing.
What Counts as a 1999–2000 Card
This section exists because the answer is more complicated than the name suggests, and almost every guide skips it.
First, the name is wrong
The hobby calls this the “4th print.” That is a misnomer. Wizards did not make four Base Set print runs — the community count is eight, and by the press-sheet evidence the run count was still climbing past an 11th job by October 1999.
Part of the confusion is that there really was a “fourth print” in 1999 — a Wizards press release used the phrase for an entirely different, much earlier production push. So the name collides with something real. Collectors now use several: “4th print”, “Base 2000” (arguably the clearest, since it names the copyright line), “1999–2000”, and “UK print”. This site uses 1999–2000 throughout, because that is what is actually printed on the card.
Then, it is not one printing — it is at least six
Print-pattern analysis of the ink layers identifies six distinguishable variants of the 1999–2000 Base Set: three from the United States, one from the UK, and two from Australia. The markers are physical — the way the magenta ink layer sits, how the borders react under black light, the card stock's density, and whether small dots are visible inside the HP figure. The US prints tend to carry those dot patterns; the UK and Australian prints do not.
This is a working taxonomy from a dedicated community research effort rather than an industry-published fact, and the three-way split of the US print is the least settled part of it. Treat “six” as the best current model, not a settled number. What it establishes firmly enough for a collector is the important part: “1999–2000” describes a copyright line shared by several physically different runs, not a single batch of cards.
It is not English-only either
The 1999–2000 copyright appears on non-English Base Set too — Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Korean and Chinese versions are documented, and a limited USA-made foreign-language run exists in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and French.
Spanish is the clearest case, and worth knowing because it is genuinely counter-intuitive: Spanish non-holos were printed with both copyright dates, with the ©1999 versions released in Spain and the ©1999–2000 versions distributed in Latin America — and Spanish holos were only ever printed with ©1999. So there is no such thing as a Spanish 1999–2000 holo.
How Many Were Printed
No production figure exists, and this is the printing where that matters most. Wizards published no print-run numbers for anything in Base Set, and no document has surfaced that sizes this run. Every number in circulation is an estimate.
What can be said with confidence is that it is the smallest of the four printings, for three converging reasons:
| Evidence | What it tells us |
|---|---|
| It is the last run | Base Set was wound down after this. There was no further printing to absorb demand, and the market had moved on to newer sets. |
| Dated press sheets | The UK plates are stamped February 2000, signed off March — a narrow, late window at the very end of Base Set's life. |
| The holo slot (see below) | Two of the three production locations filled their holo slot from leftover ©1999 stock, so the actual 1999–2000 holo output was confined to a single plant. |
| Graded populations | Consistently one to two orders of magnitude below every other printing — though see the caveat in the next section before trusting these as counts. |
One frequently repeated claim — that the 1st Edition run was five times larger than this one — comes from a single collector's estimate and cannot be verified. The direction is not in doubt: this is the smallest run. The multiple is not established.
What Came in the Products
This printing shipped in the standard Base Set forms — booster boxes and packs, blisters, the four theme decks (Overgrowth, Zap!, Brushfire and Blackout), and the 2-Player Starter Set — at the end of the product's life, into the markets described above.
The consequence is the part collectors care about: 1999–2000 holos are dramatically scarcer than 1999–2000 non-holos. The non-holos were made at every location; the holos, effectively, at one. And even UK packs do not guarantee one — a share of them still yield ©1999 holos.
The Machamp exception
As with the other Base Set printings, Machamp #8 is the card that breaks the rules. It came fixed in the 2-Player Starter Set and always carries the 1st Edition stamp, so a stamped Machamp from a 1999–2000 box is entirely normal. Its copyright line is what dates it.
There is one genuine oddity worth knowing: a 1999–2000 Starter Set can contain a Machamp that is stamped and shadowless, or stamped and shadowed. And the holo draw in this product was roughly even — so a 1999–2000 Starter Set may contain a ©1999 Machamp rather than a ©1999–2000 one.
The Cards That Matter
Because the 1999–2000 copyright is a variant rather than a distinct design, most of what makes it interesting sits in the holos — the cards the holo-slot wrinkle above pushed into a single plant's output.
Population figures for this printing are thin, incomplete, and need a caveat that no other Base Set printing requires. Here is the state of the evidence:
| Card (1999–2000) | PSA graded | PSA 10 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charizard #4 | 646–793 | 6–7 | PSA's own record (646) and a secondary aggregation (793) |
| Blastoise #2 | ~383 | 1 | Secondary aggregation — not confirmed against PSA directly |
| Pikachu #58 (non-holo) | ~233 | ~54 | CGC census only — no PSA figure published |
| Charmander #46 (non-holo) | ~316 | ~90 | CGC census only |
| Mewtwo #10 | ~57 | 0 | CGC census only |
| Machamp #8 | not published | not published | — |
Figures read 2026-09-21. Note the mixed provenance — this printing is the one Base Set run where the graders' published numbers cannot be read as a single census. See below.
So every published 1999–2000 population counts only the cards graded after recognition, plus the ones collectors have bothered to relabel. The true population is materially higher and simply unknown. PSA's own record for the Charizard — six PSA 10s across 646 graded copies — is a floor, not the number of gem-mint Charizards in existence. Collectors who hold this material privately report far more than the census shows.
One more caution: grading companies still miss the variant. Documented cases exist of 1999–2000 cards returned as late as 2023 still labelled Unlimited. Even the post-2021 figures are a noisy floor.
A note on the data itself
Two things worth knowing if you go looking for these numbers yourself, because both cost this site real time to work out.
One: the largest free population aggregator publishes a 1999–2000 page whose PSA column is empty. The figures shown are the CGC census, presented under a joint PSA/CGC heading. Anyone reading the “Total” column there as a PSA count — or as a combined count — is reading it wrong. This is the same site whose per-card census for the Unlimited printing turned out to be mis-mapped.
Two: the widely-shared community pop report that covers “every Base Set printing” does not break out this printing at all. Its tracked printings are 1st Edition, Shadowless and Unlimited only — so its “Unlimited” figures silently absorb every 1999–2000 card still sitting in an Unlimited slab, which, given the labelling gap, is most of them.
Why It Holds Value
The case rests on three things, and they compound.
The supply is genuinely the smallest of the four printings. It is the last run, produced in a narrow window at the very end of Base Set's life, and its holos — the cards that carry the value — only came out of one of the three production locations.
The population data understates it, in a way that has kept the printing cheap. Two decades of these cards were graded as ordinary Unlimited. That meant they accumulated no dedicated collector base at all until recognition began in 2021 — no one was searching for a card they did not know existed as a separate thing. Scarcity that nobody is looking for does not bid against itself.
It is the only Base Set printing whose entire identity is a legal notice. That sounds like a weakness and partly is one — but it also makes it the most self-documenting: the card tells you exactly what it is, in print, permanently, in a way no stamp or shadow does.
The scarcity story is also holo-only. The non-holos were produced at every location and are not hard to find, so the printing's premium does not lift the whole run — it sits on a small set of cards inside it. Treat this as a specialist and variant-collector market, and note that some collectors think its prices run ahead of its demand, not behind it.
Questions Collectors Ask
How do I tell a 1999–2000 card from Unlimited?
Read the Wizards half of the copyright line. Unlimited reads ©1999 Wizards; this printing reads ©1999–2000 Wizards. This is the only tell — both printings carry the drop shadow, so the shadow cannot help you. Watch out for the Nintendo half immediately before it, which is identical on both cards (©1995, 96, 98).
Why is it called the “4th print” if there were eight runs?
Because the name comes from the four distinguishable variants collectors see — 1st Edition, Shadowless, Unlimited, and this one — not from the number of press runs. Wizards ran Base Set continuously, and press-sheet job numbers climb past an 11th run by late 1999. “4th print” is a misnomer that has stuck; “Base 2000” is the more accurate nickname.
Are 1999–2000 cards rare?
The holos are the rarest of any Base Set printing, for three compounding reasons: it is the smallest run, only the UK production location reliably made holos with the new copyright, and two decades of these cards were filed by the graders as plain Unlimited. The non-holos are much more available — they were made at every location, and raw examples are not hard to find.
Does my 1999–2000 card have a “4” stamp?
No. No Base Set card of any printing carries a “4” stamp. You will read otherwise on at least one high-ranking page. The only stamp in Base Set is the “Edition 1” marker on 1st Edition cards — and on Machamp #8, which is stamped in every printing because it came fixed in the 2-Player Starter Set.
Why are the population numbers for this printing so low?
Partly because the run was small, and partly — mostly — because PSA did not label the variant until March 2021. Everything graded before that was slabbed as Unlimited, and those slabs stay that way unless the owner pays to have them relabelled. So the published counts are a floor rather than a total, and the real number of surviving copies is higher and unknown.
Keep going
The Unlimited guide covers the printing this one is most often mistaken for, and the Shadowless guide covers the other printing that carries an extra year in its copyright line.
Sources and method. The copyright-line tell is verified against Bulbapedia, CGC and Beckett, and the two sites publishing it backwards are named above. The production story rests on dated Wizards-era press-sheet sign-off records (job P06033-110, February 2000, GPS Colour Graphics, Belfast), Elite Fourum's ink-layer research on the six 1999–2000 variants, and Bulbapedia's language-by-language copyright data. Population figures are read 2026-09-21 and come from mixed sources — PSA's own per-card record for the Charizard (6 PSA 10s across 646 graded), a secondary aggregation for Blastoise, and the CGC census for the non-holos; the largest free aggregator publishes no PSA figure for this printing at all and shows CGC numbers under a joint heading. These are lower bounds, not counts, because PSA only began labelling the variant in March 2021. The in-plate corrections (Vulpix #68, Slowpoke #67) are CGC- and Bulbapedia-documented. No print-run figure exists for this or any other Base Set printing — Wizards never published one. Claims this guide declines to publish, because no verifiable source supports them: the “five times larger” 1st Edition ratio, the “two weeks” holo print window, the “20% of UK boxes” figure, and the “multiply the pop report by ten” heuristic — all are collector estimates circulating without a production record behind them.