New collectors are likely all too familiar with Jumbo cards. After all, the Pokemon Company International (“PCI”) has been sticking them was impressive frequency in nearly every mass market TCG product since the Black and White era of the TCG.
Bewear GX (standard) and Bewear GX (Jumbo) from the Bewear GX Box - currently available at most mass market retailers
What new collectors may not realize, is that this was not always the way things were handled. Back when Wizards of the Coast (“WotC”) was in charge of the English TCG, Jumbo cards were fairly rare, highly collectible items. A short history of WotC’s Jumbo promotional card releases follows.
Throughout this article, we will use the soon-to-be-internationally recognized Bewear GX unit of measurement to show the size difference between the various Jumbo cards and a standard Pokemon TCG card
Base Set Pikachu
The first Jumbo card to be released in the English adaptation of the TCG* was a Jumbo version of the Base Set Pikachu. The card was included as an insert in the February 2000 edition of Top Deck Magazine, a now out-of-print magazine that covered the collectible games industry. The card features the standard, yellow-cheek, shadowed unlimited print of Base Set Pikachu. To my knowledge, a shadowless version of the Jumbo card does not exist.
Articuno, Moltres, and Zapdos
As you can see, my personal copy of the card has seen better days, it’s been in my collection since its release in July 2000
Unlike Jumbo Pikachu, the second Jumbo promo never had a standard TCG release. Released in connection with Pokemon the Movie: 2000 and sold in Warner Bros. stores, Articuno, Moltres and Zapdos was a game changer for collectors in the heat of Pokemon fever. With 120 HP, 200 damage costing only 3 energy, this was easily the most powerful card printed at the time of its release and it drove collectors crazy, notwithstanding the fact that it was not legal for tournament play. In the years since this card’s release, additional Jumbo cards, like Shadow Lugia (300 HP, 1000 damage), have been printed with ridiculous HP and damage values, but this card set the trend.
Box Toppers
Charizard box topper from Legendary Collection
After the release of Articuno, Moltres and Zapdos, Jumbo cards were put on a two year hiatus. When they next appeared, it was as special box topper promos in the Legendary Collection expansion. For new collectors, box toppers were special cards that were inserted into booster boxes before they were sealed and shipped. Both WotC and PCI experimented with box toppers as a promotional tool to encourage consumers to purchase entire booster boxes of product. Each box of Legendary Collection included one of four, randomly inserted box toppers, including: Charizard, Dark Blastoise, Dark Raichu and Mewtwo, all featuring the new reverse foil pattern available in the booster set. Each of the Legendary Collection Jumbos contained the same set symbol as their standard set counterparts, but had a special numbering system with the cards being numbered from S1 to S4.
The next three expansions of the TCG, Expedition, Aquapolis and Skyridge (these sets, along with the promotional cards printed using the same template, are commonly referred to as the “e-series”), continued to feature box topper Jumbo promotional cards. Like Legendary Collection, each set’s booster box contained 1 of a possible 4 Jumbo variants of cards featured in the underlying expansion. Unlike Legendary Collection, the e-series Jumbo cards featured their own unique set symbol and a special foil pattern not featured on cards in the underlying set. Interestingly, the e-series box topper set was spread out across all three of the e-series releases, with cards 1-4 available in Expedition, 5-8 available in Aquapolis, and 9-12 available in Skyridge.
The Complete Box Topper set
Battlezone a/k/a the “Best of Game” Jumbo cards
Printed in connection with WotC’s BattleZone tournaments, their organized play swansong, the final Jumbo cards of the WotC era returned to their super-sized original proportions.
Jumbo Battlezone Hitmonchan
The Jumbo cards are all supersized versions of the standard size promotional cards that could be obtained in the BattleZone events (other than Professor Elm, which was not available as a Jumbo card). Interestingly, the Jumbo cards include the “Winner” stamp featured on some of the standard sized promos. This may indicated that these Jumbo cards were intended to be distributed to event organizers and, possibly, top finishers in the BattleZone tournaments, rather than to participants generally.
*Honorable Mention: CoroCoro Charizard
Another English card… sort of
One of the most sought after Jumbo cards during the early years of the TCG was the Japanese CoroCoro magazine Jumbo Charizard promo. As you can probably tell from the picture, this Japanese exclusive promo was a blown-up version of the English TCG’s Base Set Charizard. While this card is mostly printed in the English language, it was part of Media Factory’s, and not WotC’s, stewardship of the Pokemon TCG. It therefore falls outside the general scope of today’s article.
Thecardpletionist has been collecting Pokemon TCG cards since the game’s English release in 1999. You can read more from the author at http://thecardpletionist.blogspot.com/ and can follow him on Instagram.
