It is the opposite of the two early printings in almost every way. Where 1st Edition was a small stamped run that collectors stored, Unlimited is the printing Wizards actually intended to make and the one that shipped in by far the greatest volume — the cards that went to toy stores, playgrounds and tournaments and got played.
That produces Base Set's strangest statistic: Unlimited Charizard has been graded 103,122 times and has gemmed only 488 times. A 0.5% gem rate makes it the fourth-hardest PSA 10 in the whole set — harder than most 1st Editions. Commonest card, rarest gems.
This guide covers the Unlimited printing specifically: why it exists at all, how to tell it apart from the two printings either side of it, how much of it was made, which products carried it, and where its value actually sits.
Why This Printing Exists
Start with the fact that reverses the obvious assumption: Unlimited is not the leftover. It is the finished product.
The 1st Edition stamp and the Shadowless layout were both early shipments of the same card design, released before that design was complete. In 2024, Carol Monahan — Wizards of the Coast's Director of Sales & Logistics from 1993 to 2000 — described it plainly: Shadowless was “the first printing of what was supposed to be the unlimited base set.” The cards went out without the drop shadow around the art frame, and the intended layout followed.
The correction was administrative, not a new product. Wizards “simply updated the files at the printer as soon as they were able, and kept going, without changing the product code number or anything else.” That single sentence explains why the printing is so hard to define by date: there was never a moment when Wizards stopped making 1st Edition, then Shadowless, then Unlimited. There was one product, and at some point in 1999 its artwork files were corrected.
What the redesign changed
Only the card face moved. The drop shadow added depth behind the illustration window; the HP value and attack text were set heavier. The copyright sequence dropped its last year. The 102 artworks, the yellow border and the card back were untouched.
Why the shadow mattered at all is easier to understand if you look east: the Japanese Base Set already had it. The English launch template shipped without it, which the collector community generally reads as a localisation gap rather than a deliberate design choice — the English cards being finalised as Nintendo's input reshaped the set. That reconstruction is community analysis, not a Wizards statement, and the guide flags it as such. What is undisputed is that the final artwork includes the shadow, and the earlier shipments do not.
The printing that never really stopped
Unlike the two early printings, Unlimited was not one run. It was a rolling production that Wizards kept feeding for roughly a year.
The physical evidence is the best we have, because it is dated. Wizards-era press sheets carry sign-off dates and job numbers, and collectors have catalogued them. Base Set sheets for the transitional (Shadowless) artwork are signed off in January and February 1999. Clear post-redesign Unlimited jobs then run from July 1999 onward — and the archive climbs to at least an “11th Run” of Base Unlimited by October 1999, printed across different plants including Yaquinto and PBM Graphics.
It then kept going past the sets that supposedly came “next.” Base Set was still being printed into roughly the first half of 2000 while Team Rocket was already on US shelves — the sets overlapped rather than following one another.
Which brings us to the names. What the hobby calls the “4th print” is not a new product at all: it is the copyright year rolling over, which forced a plate change. The cards are the Unlimited design with a single line edited. That is why this site treats it as a separate printing to be identified, but not a separate creation.
How to Tell an Unlimited Card
Unlimited is the drop-shadow printing, and that one feature separates it from both 1st Edition and Shadowless on sight. The difficulty is not telling Unlimited from them — it is telling Unlimited from the 1999–2000 print, because those two share the shadow. Four checks, in this order.
1. The drop shadow — present
A soft grey shadow runs down the right side and along the bottom of the illustration window, lifting the art off the yellow border. 1st Edition and Shadowless have no shadow; the frame sits flat. This is the fastest check on a Pokémon card and the one that settles most questions at a glance.
It has a limit worth knowing: the shadow exists only on Pokémon cards. Trainer and Energy cards have no illustration window, so they never received one in any printing.
2. The copyright line — the one that actually decides it
This is the load-bearing check, and the reason the two earlier guides pair it with the shadow. 1st Edition and Shadowless read ©1995, 96, 98, 99 Nintendo, Creatures, GAMEFREAK. Unlimited reads ©1995, 96, 98 — the final “99” is gone.
Beckett describes that year as the most consistent identifier on the card, and notes that it survives wear better than the visual differences — which matters on a printing this well handled. It is also the only tell that works on Trainers and Energy, where there is no art frame to inspect.
3. The HP and attack font — bolder, but only a tiebreaker
Unlimited's HP value and attack text are set heavier than the thin type of the earlier printings. The difference is real but subtle, and it is the check that photographs worst — treat it as confirmation of a call you have already made, never as the first test.
4. The stamp — absent
No Unlimited card carries the black “Edition 1” stamp, with one legitimate exception covered below: Machamp #8.
The hard pair: Unlimited or the 1999–2000 print?
Both carry the drop shadow, so the shadow cannot separate them. The only reliable discriminator is the Wizards date at the very end of the copyright line:
| Printing | Nintendo date string | Wizards date |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited | ©1995, 96, 98 | ©1999 |
| 1999–2000 (“4th print”) | ©1995, 96, 98 | ©1999–2000 |
Read the Wizards half, not the Nintendo half — conflating the two is the error that trips most guides. The distinction matters because the two printings are genuinely far apart in supply: the 1999–2000 plate mostly served the UK and Australian markets, which is why collectors call it the “UK print,” and only the UK run is confirmed to yield holos carrying that copyright at all. A plain Unlimited card is the common one; a 1999–2000 card is not.
How Many Were Printed
There is no production figure for Unlimited, and there never has been. Wizards published no print-run figures for any Base Set printing — not for 1st Edition, not for Shadowless, not for this one. Every number that circulates is a reconstruction or a guess, and the honest answer is that the largest print run in Base Set has no known size.
What can be established is the direction and the shape, and both are unusually clear.
| Evidence | What it tells us |
|---|---|
| Press-sheet job numbers (Pokémuseum uncut-sheet archive) | Wizards ran Base Unlimited as many discrete jobs, not one batch — the archive reaches at least an 11th Run by October 1999, across multiple plants. |
| Concurrent printing (Elite Fourum, 2018) | Base Set was printed into roughly the first half of 2000, alongside Team Rocket — a production window no short run could produce. |
| Capacity evidence (Carol Monahan, ex-WotC, 2024) | Wizards rented space and 17 refrigerated semi trailers to hold Pokémon stock in summer 1999; capacity, press time and cardstock were the constraints. US revenues quadrupled 1998→1999. |
| Industry capacity (Kotaku, 2011) | Demand was so high that sporting-card lines were shut down in 1999 to print enough Pokémon packs. |
| Grading submissions (PSA census, 2026-08-20) | Unlimited Charizard 103,122 graded vs Shadowless 14,408 vs 1st Edition 5,593. A proxy for volume, not a measurement of it. |
The one quantified estimate in existence comes from the collector community rather than Wizards: a modelling thread on Elite Fourum put Base Set at roughly 3 billion cards across all languages — built from Pokémon's own lifetime totals, and explicitly labelled a work in progress. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure. If it is anywhere near right, Unlimited is the overwhelming majority of Base Set.
One caution on reading the grading numbers. Submissions are not production. The 1st Edition stamp made grading worthwhile at almost any grade for three decades, so stamped cards were systematically sent in and are over-represented in every census. Unlimited cards were not, so the true production gap between the two is wider than the 18-to-1 submission ratio suggests.
What Came in the Products
Unlimited shipped in every form Base Set was sold in — which is the practical reason it is everywhere:
- Booster boxes — 36 packs, 11 cards each, roughly 12 holos to a box.
- Booster packs, and blister packs for retail racks.
- The four theme decks — Overgrowth, Zap!, Brushfire and Blackout — each a 60-card deck with a Chansey coin, damage counters and a rulebook.
- The 2-Player Starter Set, with its fixed holo Machamp.
- Multipack “booster bags” and gift boxes in the US market.
Telling an Unlimited pack
Packaging changed with the redesign, and the tells are reliable: the TCG logo moved to the top of the pack, the front text became “11 ADDITIONAL GAME CARDS” where the Shadowless design read “11 Tradable Game Cards,” and the crimp became a short/rack seal rather than the longer seal of the earlier packs. At box level the most common variant carries the “blue-wing” Charizard artwork and the rectangular Wizards logo — Wizards only changed to the arched logo in October 1999.
The Machamp exception
Every Base Set Machamp came from the 2-Player Starter Set, and every starter-set Machamp carries the 1st Edition stamp — the stamp stayed on that card for the life of the product, including Unlimited-era boxes. So an Unlimited-period Starter Set legitimately contains a stamped card.
It is also the one card where a stamp and a drop shadow appear together without anything being wrong. If you are holding a stamped Machamp with a shadow, that is normal. If you are holding a stamped card with a shadow and it is not Machamp, that is a fake stamp.
The stamp-less Machamp does exist, but only in one place: the Trainer Deck A prototype teaching deck, where it is non-holo and carries a red card back reading “Trainer Deck A.” That red back is the definitive way to identify the deck — not the card front.
The Cards That Actually Matter
Unlimited sets the floor under Base Set — and, counter-intuitively, holds some of its ceiling. The holos below are ordered by how much the printing is actually graded, with the population figures from PSA's census and a single-point price for the gem-mint grade.
| Card | PSA graded | PSA 10 | Gem rate | PSA 10 value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charizard #4 | 103,122 | 488 | 0.5% | ~$13,100 |
| Blastoise #2 | 51,267 | 381 | 0.7% | ~$6,700 |
| Venusaur #15 | 46,313 | 584 | 1.3% | ~$3,300 |
| Mewtwo #10 | 30,800 | 596 | 1.9% | ~$4,200 |
| Gyarados #6 | 24,952 | 533 | 2.1% | ~$2,400 |
| Ninetales #12 | 21,016 | 480 | 2.3% | ~$1,700 |
| Alakazam #1 | 20,175 | 457 | 2.3% | ~$2,700 |
| Zapdos #16 | 19,060 | 685 | 3.6% | ~$1,900 |
| Hitmonchan #7 | 17,202 | 211 | 1.2% | ~$2,400 |
| Raichu #14 | 17,017 | 255 | 1.5% | ~$3,200 |
| Chansey #3 | 16,110 | 147 | 0.9% | ~$8,700 |
| Nidoking #11 | 15,867 | 374 | 2.4% | ~$1,100 |
| Poliwrath #13 | 15,213 | 567 | 3.7% | ~$1,100 |
Population and prices: PSA census as published by PokeInvest, data refreshed 2026-08-20; values are single-point PSA 10 reads on the same date and move monthly.
Read that table and the set's real story appears. Charizard is the anchor — 103,122 submissions is more graded copies than any other card in Base Set by a wide margin, and it still gems at half a percent. But the columns that surprise people are Chansey and Hitmonchan. Chansey is graded 16,110 times and has produced just 147 PSA 10s, which is why the gem-mint card carries a value near Blastoise's despite being a cheaper raw card. Hitmonchan, at 211 gems, is the lowest gem count of any Unlimited holo here.
The error cards that belong to this printing
Several of the best-known Base Set errors are Unlimited errors — and a couple of famous ones are not, which is where collectors most often go wrong.
| Error | Printing |
|---|---|
| Wartortle Evolution Box error (Wartortle shown in the evolution box instead of Squirtle, #42) | Unlimited |
| Charizard Black Dot error (dot above the “t” in Nintendo) | Unlimited |
| Blastoise Red Dot error (red dot above Hydro Pump's energy cost) | Unlimited |
| Blastoise “Stage” omitted, and the faded “Illus.” credit | Unlimited |
| Diglett Fight Symbol error (rotated energy symbol), from the 2-Player Starter Set | Unlimited |
| Hitmonchan holobleed / low-ink variant, from the Blackout theme deck | Unlimited |
| No Damage Ninetales (Fire Blast missing its “80”) | Shadowless — not Unlimited |
| Ghost Stamp Pikachu | Shadowless — not Unlimited |
Both of those last two are theme-deck errors from the Shadowless era, and both are widely filed under “Base Set errors” without a printing attached. If you are looking for them on an Unlimited card, you are looking for the wrong thing.
Why It Holds Value
Unlimited is the printing that got played. That is the whole value story, and it is counter-intuitive for anyone who assumes the biggest print run must be the least interesting one.
The timing explains it. 1st Edition sold out to early collectors before Pokémania peaked, so those cards were bought by people who stored them. Unlimited arrived in mid-1999 at the height of the craze and went where the game was actually being played — toy stores, playgrounds, and the tournament circuit. The contemporaneous record is full of it: 1999 tournament reports from Roselle, Illinois and DCI-sanctioned events in Michigan list winning decks built from Base Set cards that were being shuffled, sleeved and worn by the players running them.
The census carries the scar. Unlimited Charizard has been submitted 103,122 times and gemmed 488 times — a 0.5% gem rate, the fourth-hardest in Base Set. A card that plentiful should not be that hard to find in mint condition. It is that hard because the copies that were handled are exactly the copies that do not grade high.
What follows from that split is where the printing's value actually concentrates. Raw, played Unlimited singles are cheap and will stay cheap — there are a lot of them. High-grade Unlimited is scarce for a structural reason: the cards were made in enormous numbers and then used, so the surviving mint supply is small relative to demand for a well-centred vintage holo. That is a different kind of scarcity from Shadowless (fewer made) or 1st Edition (fewer made, and hoarded), but it is still scarcity, and it shows up in every gem rate on this page.
Questions Collectors Ask
Is Unlimited the rarest Base Set printing?
The opposite — it is by far the largest, and it is the printing most Base Set cards in the world belong to. What is scarce is Unlimited in high grade. PSA has graded 103,122 Unlimited Charizards and given only 488 of them a ten, a 0.5% gem rate that makes gem-mint Unlimited harder to find than gem-mint 1st Edition. Commonest printing, rarest gems.
How do I tell Unlimited from Shadowless?
The drop shadow. Unlimited has a grey shadow down the right side and along the bottom of the artwork; Shadowless has none. Confirm with the copyright line: Unlimited reads ©1995, 96, 98, while Shadowless reads ©1995, 96, 98, 99. Neither carries a stamp.
How do I tell Unlimited from the 1999–2000 print?
Read the Wizards date at the end of the copyright line. Unlimited reads ©1999; the 1999–2000 print reads ©1999–2000. Both carry the drop shadow, so the shadow cannot help you here — and watch out for guides that compare the Nintendo date string instead, because the two date elements sit next to each other and are easy to mix up.
Why are Unlimited PSA 10s so rare if so many were printed?
Because the printing was played. Unlimited reached the market at peak Pokémania and went into decks, playgrounds and tournaments rather than into storage — unlike 1st Edition, which early collectors bought and kept. The enormous print run is exactly why so many copies were handled, and handling is what keeps a card out of gem mint.
Should my Unlimited Pikachu have red cheeks?
No. Red-cheeked artwork was confined to the 1st Edition and Shadowless runs; every Unlimited Pikachu is yellow-cheeked. A card showing a drop shadow and red cheeks together has been misidentified or altered.
Keep going
The Shadowless guide covers the accidental printing this one replaced, and the 1st Edition guide covers the stamped launch run.
Sources and method. Identification tells are verified against Bulbapedia, Beckett and CGC, cross-checked against card photographs; three sites publishing the copyright tell backwards are named above. The production story rests on Carol Monahan's 2024 interview (ex-WotC Director of Sales & Logistics), dated Wizards-era press-sheet sign-off records, and Elite Fourum primary-evidence threads. Population figures are PSA's census as published by PokeInvest, data refreshed 2026-08-20; prices are single-point PSA 10 reads on the same date and move monthly. Grade counts measure what has been submitted, not what was printed, and stamped cards are over-represented in every census because the stamp made grading worthwhile at almost any grade. No print-run figure exists for this or any other Base Set printing — Wizards never published one — and where estimates are quoted they are labelled as community estimates. Two claims this guide declines to publish, because no dated evidence supports them: any exact start date for the drop-shadow plates, and the widely repeated “10×” and “4–6×” price multipliers between printings, which trace to a single unreferenced source and are inconsistent with grade-matched sale data.