Live Now on eBay: 1st Edition Lass

What the card is actually being offered for right now. Every listing below is filtered to the genuine 1st Edition card — no repacks, mystery slabs, card skins, or multi-card lots. These are asking prices, not sold comps, so treat them as the top of the market rather than what copies are changing hands for. Buying through these links supports the site at no extra cost to you.

Which One Do You Have? The 3-Second Test

Most people who say “I have a 1st Edition Lass” don’t. Retail packs in 1999–2000 were overwhelmingly Unlimited printing — and that’s fine, it’s the same iconic card. The fast check, in order:

1. Right edge of the art box: a dark drop shadow = Unlimited or 4th Print. No shadow = keep going.
2. Left of the art box: a black “Edition 1” stamp = 1st Edition. No stamp + no shadow = Shadowless.
3. Bottom copyright line: ©1999-2000 = 4th Print. The font weight is the tiebreaker — thin HP text means an early print.

Lass is a Trainer card illustrated by Ken Sugimori. Trainers were rarely played to death, so demanding a sharp, well-centred copy costs you very little.

The four printings of Base Set each have their own price and history: 1st Edition · Shadowless · Unlimited · 4th Print.

PSA 8 prices from PriceCharting sold-comp data, September 2026. Unlimited and 4th Print look nearly identical — the copyright year is the difference. Each printing is its own card with its own price and history; see every printing: 1st Edition · Shadowless · Unlimited · 4th Print.

About This Card and Set

Lass is a Trainer from the very first English Pokémon set, and its identity is a little different from what newcomers expect. The card is not named for a single famous character but for a recurring class of opponents met throughout Pokémon Red and Blue: a Lass, the female counterpart to the Youngster. In Japan the card was printed as Miniskirt; when Wizards of the Coast localised the Base Set for English release in 1999, that class name was rendered as Lass.

What makes the card memorable is its effect: both players reveal their hands, and every Trainer card in those hands is shuffled back into its owner’s deck. In an era before Trainers were split into Items, Stadiums and Supporters, that was an unusually symmetrical design — the card hit the player who used it just as hard as the opponent, which is why accounts of the period describe it as decisive in the right moment and near-useless in the wrong one.

Rulings questions followed. The rulings compendium had to clarify in 2000 that a player holding no Trainer cards cannot shuffle at all, because the instruction depends on there being something to return. In Japan alone, all prints were later errata’d to play as Supporter cards; the English prints were never reworded and still function as ordinary Trainer cards.

The illustration is a Ken Sugimori depiction of the generic class member rather than a story character, which is a genuine source of confusion — collectors occasionally refer to the “Lass character” as though she were a named rival. The card appeared again in the Base Set 2 reissue (104/130) in 2000 and has not been reprinted since; later cards sharing the name, such as Lass’s Special, are separate designs.

How Rare Is This Card?

Read this card by its grade split rather than by a headline population. 11.6% of PSA-graded copies reach PSA 10, 11.9% come back grade 6 or below, and the rest land in between — which is what set the price ladder above. The odds column is the number that matters, because high-grade supply is what the market actually pays for.

Trainers from this run were preserved far better than played Pokémon cards, which is why Lass converts to a PSA 10 at 11.6%, well above what a played 1999 card typically manages.

PriceCharting population data, September 2026. The modern row is a combined PSA + CGC count; the 1999 row is PSA, the way it is normally quoted.

For scale, a comparable modern chase card converts to a gem grade at roughly 29%. Modern cards grade far better than vintage ones — not because they are better cards, but because a 1999 card was printed before grading was mainstream and then spent two decades in a binder.

Source: the PSA-only figures behind the Cards Worth Chasing ranking, September 2026. Two caveats stay attached to every population figure on this site. Graded counts are submission tallies, not unique cards — resubmissions inflate the total. And the census is a floor, not a final number.

Known Error Cards

No printing-specific error or misprint is documented for the Base Set 75/102 Lass in any of the four standard references. Bulbapedia’s error-cards article lists no Lass entry, the PSA Pokémon Error Guide records none, PokéBeach’s error and misprint databases do not cite her, and Elite Fourum’s English Base Set Master Misprint Guide catalogues no Lass variant. For the 1st Edition printing specifically, this means there is no known catalogued error at all — the sources agree.

The only relevant qualification is set-wide rather than card-specific. The 1st Edition Base Set as a whole is known for stamp anomalies: faint or insufficient-ink “grey” stamps, smeared or misaligned stamps, and inverted impressions transferred to card backs when sheets were stacked before the ink dried. These are catalogued against the set generally, not attributed to Lass, and a one-off printer hickey is not a catalogued error.

What Makes This Card Collectible?

Lass is collected for a design decision Base Set only made once:

• The set’s one symmetrical effect. It punished the player who used it as hard as the opponent — a design Base Set never repeated.
• A strong gem rate for a played-era card. Trainers of this run survived far better than played Pokémon, which shows up directly in the grade split.

The 1st Edition printing hub covers what separates this print, and the Base Set hub places the Trainer half of the set in context.

The Artist: Ken Sugimori

Ken Sugimori is one of the illustrators who defined the look of the original English Pokémon TCG, and Lass is one of their Base Set contributions. This section will carry their full numbers when the artist guide lands.

Caleb's Collector Verdict

Lass is the most interesting of the set’s Trainers as a piece of design: a card that deliberately handicaps its own user, printed once and never rebuilt, with a strong grade split on a cheap raw copy.

People Also Ask

Is my 1st Edition Lass real or fake?
The 1999 Base Set cards are the most counterfeited in the hobby, and for a raw copy worth real money you cannot settle it from a photo. The checks that catch most fakes: the light test (a genuine card is essentially opaque — a faint dark core line between the layers; cheap fakes glow through), the stamp rule (a real 1st Edition stamp is crisp and sits under the ink, and counterfeiters add stamps to Unlimited cards — read it with the drop shadow and the 1995-99 copyright line, never alone), and the back (fakes perfect the front and neglect the Poké Ball, the blue tone and the repeated text). Above a few hundred dollars, a raw copy should get professional pre-authentication. The full fake-detection walkthrough covers all of it.

Should I grade this card?
This is the strongest grading candidate in the batch on odds alone — the highest Gem Mint rate here, on a card that costs $82 raw. On a clean copy the arithmetic favours sending it in. See Should You Grade Pokémon Cards? for the fee maths, and check a raw copy with the CardGrader scanner before sending it in.

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