Somebody hands you a Charizard from 1999 and asks what it is worth. The answer is not one number, it is three, and they are a long way apart. English Base Set was printed more than once, the runs look almost identical, and the thing that separates the two most valuable ones is a shadow that is not there.
Start here
Two marks, and you check them in this order
First, look under the left edge of the artwork for a small black stamp reading EDITION 1. If it is there, stop: you have a 1st Edition. If it is not, look at the right edge of the artwork window instead. A gray band running down the outside of that edge means Unlimited. No band, no stamp, and you are holding a Shadowless. Everything else on this page is a second opinion on those two marks.
A schematic, not three real cards. The stamp and the shadow are the only two differences drawn,
because they are the only two you can act on. Both are drawn larger than life; the shadow on a real card is
about the width of the yellow border stripe next to it.
1
Is there a stamp?
A black circle with a 1 in it, under the left
edge of the artwork. Yes means 1st Edition and you can stop.
2
Is there a shadow?
A gray band down the outside of the artwork
window's right edge. Yes means Unlimited.
3
Neither?
No stamp and no shadow is a Shadowless. It is the one
with nothing printed on it to say so, which is exactly why people miss it.
The four runs
Four printings, two marks
English Base Set came out on January 9, 1999 with
102 cards in it, and it was printed more than once. These are the
runs, oldest first, and the market prices them in that order.
1st Edition
First run • From the English release, January 9, 1999
A black EDITION 1 stamp under the left edge of the artwork, and no drop shadow around the artwork window.
The stamp is on the cards, on the booster packs and on the boxes. Wizards of the Coast used 1st Edition runs for the English and European releases from the start of the game in the West, on every set except Base Set 2, up to and including Neo Destiny.
Has the stampNo shadow
Shadowless
Second run • Shortly after the 1st Edition run, 1999
No stamp and still no drop shadow. Otherwise the same card as a 1st Edition, down to the typeface.
A transitional print: the plates lost the 1st Edition stamp and nothing else. That is why it has no mark of its own to look for, and why the only way to spot one is by what is missing. It happened in English only. Every other language printed its 1st Edition run on the later layout, shadow and all, so there is no French or German Shadowless.
No stampNo shadow
Unlimited
Third run • 1999, and the one that kept being printed
A drop shadow down the right side of the artwork window and along its bottom, so the picture sits on the card rather than in it. The HP and the attack text are printed heavier too.
This is the one almost everybody has. It is the run that stayed in print, which is the whole reason it is called Unlimited, and it is the baseline the other two are worth a multiple of.
No stampHas the shadow
The 1999-2000 reprint
Fourth run • 1999 into 2000
An Unlimited card in every visible way except the small print along the bottom, which reads 1999-2000 Wizards where every earlier run reads 1999 Wizards.
Collectors call it the 4th print. It is not a different card and it is not rarer than Unlimited; it is a separate line in the price guides, which is the only reason it is worth naming here at all.
No stampHas the shadow
The shadow, up close
This is the difference between a card worth a few hundred dollars and the same card worth a
few thousand, and it is a band of gray ink about two millimeters wide. It is the tell most people holding a
1999 card have never heard of, because nothing on the card names it.
Exaggerated so it survives a phone screen. On a real card the band is a couple of millimeters and it
runs down the right side of the window and along the bottom, never the top or the left. Tilt the card under a
light: a real shadow has a soft outer edge, which is what tells it apart from a scuff.
It is drawn rather than photographed on purpose. We can reach a good scan of a 1st Edition
card and we cannot reach one of an Unlimited: the only Unlimited and Shadowless pictures available here are
product photographs 325 pixels wide, shot at slightly different crops. Two millimeters read off two
photographs that do not line up is a suggestion, not evidence, so the geometry is drawn and the caption says
what has been exaggerated.
On a real card
The stamp, on an actual scan
Not a drawing. This is TCGdex's scan of Base Set Charizard, and it happens to be a 1st
Edition copy: all 16 Base Set Holofoil scans TCGdex serves carry the stamp, checked one by one on
August 17, 2026. Hold your own card next to it.
A 1st Edition Base Set Charizard, 4/102, scanned by TCGdex. Every magnified picture on
this page is a crop of this one file, so you can check any of it against the whole card.
The stamp, magnified. A black circle, a 1, and EDITION curved over the top
The bottom edge. Four years, then 1999 Wizards, then 4/102 and a star with no set symbol between them
Where each check happens
Every check and where it happens. Mark 4 is the card number, and what matters there is the
empty space beside it: Base Set prints no expansion symbol. A schematic, not a real card, and it is
drawn with the stamp and the shadow both showing so all four marks can be pointed at. No real card carries
both.
1
The 1st Edition stamp
Decides it outright
Under the left edge of the artwork, level with the Pokemon's height and weight bar
A small black circle with a 1 in it and the word EDITION curved over the top. It is printed, not stuck on, and it is in the yellow border area rather than inside the picture.
Why it works. It is the only mark on the card that is unique to one run. Everything else on this page is a difference between two runs that you have to know to see.
But. It is not the expansion symbol. Base Set does not have one at all, which is why the bottom right of the card is just the number and a rarity mark with a blank space where later sets print a symbol.
Read off a card scan here, August 17, 2026
2
The drop shadow
Decides it outright
The right edge of the artwork window, and along the bottom of it
Hold the card square on under a light and look at the outside of the artwork frame on the right. Unlimited prints a soft gray band there, a couple of millimeters wide, so the window looks raised. 1st Edition and Shadowless print nothing: the yellow of the border runs straight up to the frame.
Why it works. It is the one difference between Shadowless and Unlimited, and it is the reason Shadowless has a name at all rather than a stamp.
But. Trainer and Energy cards have no artwork window, so they have no shadow to check either way. On those, the copyright line below is the tell.
Bulbapedia, 1st Edition (TCG), read August 17, 2026
3
The copyright line
Second opinion, and the only one for Trainers
The bottom edge of the card, to the right of the illustrator credit
Two halves, and they answer two different questions. The first half is a list of years: 1st Edition and Shadowless print 1995, 96, 98, 99 and Unlimited drops the 99 to read 1995, 96, 98. The second half is the Wizards line: everything up to and including Unlimited reads 1999 Wizards, and the 4th print reads 1999-2000 Wizards.
Why it works. It works on every card in the set, artwork window or not, and it is the only way to pick the 4th print out of a pile of Unlimiteds.
But. It is a line of six point type on a 27 year old card. Read it in good light, and read the shadow first: the shadow is a centimeter tall and this is a millimeter.
Half read off a card scan here, half Bulbapedia's, August 17, 2026
4
The weight of the HP and the attack text
Supporting evidence only
Top right for the HP, the attack block for the rest
1st Edition and Shadowless print the HP figure and the attack text thinner than Unlimited does.
Why it works. It is a whole-card difference rather than a single mark, so it is what makes a Shadowless look subtly off once you have handled a few.
But. This is the one claim on this page we are repeating rather than checking. It needs two cards side by side at the same scale and the same scan quality, and we do not have a Shadowless and an Unlimited scan good enough to compare honestly. Use the shadow.
Bulbapedia, 1st Edition (TCG), read August 17, 2026
5
No expansion symbol at all
Tells you it is Base Set, not which run
Bottom right, beside the card number
The bottom right of a Base Set card reads 4/102 and then a small rarity mark, with nothing between them. Every set after Base Set prints a little expansion symbol in that gap.
Why it works. It is the fastest way to know you are looking at Base Set at all rather than at Base Set 2 or Legendary Collection, both of which reprint the same artwork and both of which do carry a symbol.
Read off a card scan here, August 17, 2026
The small print
The copyright line, character by character
It runs along the very bottom of the card, to the right of the illustrator credit. Two
halves, and each half answers a different question. This is the only check that works on Trainer and Energy
cards, which have no artwork window and therefore no shadow either way.
The second half is ours: we read 1999-2000 Wizards off a photograph of that printing
and 1999 Wizards off the scan magnified above, on August 17, 2026. The first half, the
missing , 99 on Unlimited, is Bulbapedia's, because the plain Unlimited scan we can reach is too soft
to read it. It is marked here rather than smoothed over.
Why Shadowless exists at all
Shadowless is the odd one out because it is the only run defined by something it does not have. 1st Edition has a stamp. Unlimited has a shadow. Shadowless has neither, and there is nothing printed anywhere on the card that says so.
That is because it is not a reprint, it is the same run continuing. The 1st Edition plates lost the stamp and kept everything else, so for a while English Base Set was being printed with no stamp and still no shadow. The redesign that added the drop shadow, and the heavier HP and attack text with it, came after that. The shadow is the second change, not the first, and Shadowless is the gap between the two.
So the scarcity order is the order the runs were printed in, and the market prices it that way: 1st Edition above Shadowless above Unlimited. There is no published figure for how many of any of them were made, and this page does not guess.
PRINT RUN ORDER, THE LAYOUT CHANGE AND THE FACT THAT SHADOWLESS WAS ENGLISH ONLY:
BULBAPEDIA'S 1ST EDITION (TCG) ARTICLE, READ AUGUST 17, 2026. NAMED IN PLAIN TEXT
RATHER THAN LINKED, WHICH IS HOW THIS SITE CREDITS AN OUTSIDE SOURCE.
The money
What each one is worth
One card, three printings, one price guide, read on the same day. This is the clearest number anyone can put on the gap, and it is worth reading the three columns rather than only the big one.
No scan available for this printingThe 1999-2000 reprintFourth runNo double-read figure for this printing, so none is printed.
Every figure above is PriceCharting's price guide for
Charizard 4/102, one line per printing, read on August 22, 2026 and read a second time from each card's
own product page before it was published here. It is a guide value computed from completed sales, not a
record of any single sale. Prices move and this page does not.
Why a marketplace says $10,000 for this card.
A marketplace will tell you something different, and both figures are real. TCGplayer's market price for the same ungraded Charizard, read August 22, 2026, is $10,000 against the $868 guide value here. Blastoise's Shadowless printing has a market price and no guide value at all, Venusaur's Shadowless printing has a market price and no guide value at all, because the guide file is ranked by PSA 10 value and stops before it. A guide value is computed across the sales PriceCharting tracks; Market Price is what recently sold on one marketplace, and on a card that trades a handful of times a year the two can sit a long way apart. Neither is the other's correction. Every raw price on this site is the guide value, including
the 100 most valuable raw cards, so the two never disagree
from one of our pages to the next.
13.0x
1st Edition over Unlimited, ungraded
1.7x
Shadowless over Unlimited, ungraded
12.2x
1st Edition over Unlimited, PSA 10
1.1x
Shadowless over Unlimited, PSA 10
The PSA 10 column is where the three runs look closest and it is also where the evidence is thinnest, because a card that has not sold recently in that grade has no figure at all. The ungraded and Grade 9 columns are the ones with sales behind them, and that is where the print run actually shows up. Look at those four numbers together rather than
at the biggest one: the print run shows up hard in the ungraded column and almost vanishes in PSA 10, where
a handful of sales is doing all the work.
And the packs themselves are their own market. TCGplayer's market price for a single
sealed Base Set (Shadowless) 1st Edition booster pack was $15,000 when the
sealed list was read on Aug 22, 2026, which made it the second
most expensive sealed Pokemon product on that whole list. Note what TCGplayer calls it: the 1st Edition packs are
filed under a set named Base Set (Shadowless), because 1st Edition cards ARE shadowless. The stamp is the
extra thing, not a different card.
Do not get caught
Four ways this goes wrong
Base Set 2 is not Base Set
A 130 card set from February 2000 that reprints most of Base Set and Jungle together, artwork and all, including Charizard. It carries an expansion symbol in the bottom right where Base Set has a blank space, its card numbers run to 130 rather than 102, and it never had a 1st Edition run. It is worth a small fraction of the thing it looks like.
The 4th print is not a fourth rarity
A card reading 1999-2000 along the bottom is a late Unlimited card. It gets its own line in the price guides because the guides list every printing separately, not because it is scarcer. Do not pay a 1st Edition price for a 1999-2000 date because both of them are not the plain 1999 one.
Shadowless is also what a fake looks like
A counterfeit printed from a scan of a 1st Edition, with the stamp erased, is shadowless too. Everything on this page is a comparison between real printings and none of it is an authentication check. Run the physical tests first: the black core at the edge, the print pattern under a loupe, the back color against a card you trust.
Condition decides more of the price than the run does
The gap between a graded and an ungraded copy of the same card is bigger than the gap between two print runs, and cards this old have spent 27 years in binders, shoeboxes and rubber bands. Before you get excited about a shadow, look at the corners, the surface and the centering.
Base Set 2 came out on
February 24, 2000 with 130
cards, against Base Set's 102. Both counts are from
the full expansion list, which is where to check any set on this page.
If the question is whether the card is real at all rather than which run it is, that is a
different page and a longer one: the real or fake checks cover the black core
at the edge, the print pattern under a loupe and the back color. If it is real and you want to know what it
is worth in the hand, condition decides most of it, so start with
will it grade and then
what grading costs. For the symbol in the corner of anything newer than this,
the rarity guide shows every one of them magnified on a real card, and
the set finder reads the number after the slash.
The questions this page gets asked
How do I know if my Base Set card is 1st Edition?
Look under the left edge of the artwork for a small black circle with a 1 in it and the word EDITION curved over the top. If it is there the card is 1st Edition. It is not the expansion symbol: Base Set does not have one.
What does shadowless mean on a Pokemon card?
It means the artwork window has no drop shadow around it. On an Unlimited Base Set card a soft gray band runs down the right side of the artwork window and along its bottom. On a Shadowless card there is nothing there, and there is no 1st Edition stamp either. Shadowless was the second English print run of Base Set, between the 1st Edition run and Unlimited.
Is shadowless worth more than unlimited?
Yes, and the gap is clearest on ungraded copies. PriceCharting's price guide, read Aug 22, 2026, put an ungraded Shadowless Base Set Charizard at $868 against $501 for the Unlimited printing of the same card. Those are price guide values. A marketplace measures something different: TCGplayer's market price for the same ungraded Shadowless Charizard, read August 22, 2026, was $10,000, because Market Price is what recently sold on that one marketplace while a guide value is computed across the wider set of sales PriceCharting tracks. Neither figure is the other's correction.
Are 1st Edition cards shadowless?
Yes. Every 1st Edition Base Set card is also shadowless, because the shadow was added later. That is why the stamp is checked first: a card with the stamp is 1st Edition, and a card with no stamp and no shadow is what collectors call Shadowless.
What does the 1999-2000 copyright mean on a Pokemon card?
It is the fourth Base Set print run, sometimes called the 4th print. It looks like an Unlimited card in every other way. Every earlier run reads 1999 Wizards along the bottom edge; this one reads 1999-2000 Wizards. It is not rarer than Unlimited.
Does Base Set have a set symbol?
No. The bottom right of a Base Set card is the card number and a rarity mark with an empty space between them. Every set after it prints an expansion symbol in that gap, which is the quickest way to tell a Base Set card from a Base Set 2 reprint of the same artwork.
Where all of this came from
Print run order, the layout changes, the Trainer card copyright tell and the fact that Shadowless was English only: Bulbapedia's 1st Edition (TCG) article, read August 17, 2026. Named in plain text rather than linked, which is how this site credits an outside source.
The EDITION 1 stamp, the missing expansion symbol and the copyright line: read off TCGdex's own scans of Base Set on August 17, 2026. All 16 Base Set Holofoil scans TCGdex serves carry the stamp, so its Base Set is scanned from a 1st Edition copy, which is where the magnified pictures on this page come from.
The 1999-2000 copyright line: read off PriceCharting's photograph of that printing on August 17, 2026, where it is legible as 1995, 96, 98 Nintendo, Creatures, GAMEFREAK. 1999-2000 Wizards.
Release dates and card counts: api.pokemontcg.io, through this site's own expansion list.
Prices: PriceCharting's PSA 10 price guide, crawled August 16, 2026 and re-read from each card's own product page before publication. The sealed pack figure is TCGplayer market price, read August 16, 2026.
What we could not check, and left in the open
A guide that quietly drops what it could not confirm teaches you nothing about how much to
trust the rest of it. So here is the list.
That the yellow border is thinner on Shadowless than on Unlimited. It is repeated everywhere and we could not check it: it needs two cards measured in the hand, and a scan is cropped by whoever made it, so measuring a border off one proves nothing.
That the HP and attack text are thinner on Shadowless. Bulbapedia says so and it is on the page as Bulbapedia's claim, not as ours: we have no Shadowless and Unlimited pair scanned well enough at the same scale to compare.
How many of each run were printed. Nobody has published it, so every figure in circulation is an estimate, and this page states none.
Whether the copyright year list differs on the Unlimited run specifically. Bulbapedia says Unlimited drops the 99. We could read that difference clearly on the 1999-2000 printing and the scan we have of a plain Unlimited is too soft to confirm it, so that half of the tell is Bulbapedia's rather than ours.
NO PULL RATES, NO ODDS AND NO PRINT RUN SIZES ANYWHERE ON THIS PAGE. NOBODY HAS EVER
PUBLISHED HOW MANY 1ST EDITION BASE SET CARDS WERE MADE, SO EVERY FIGURE IN CIRCULATION IS SOMEBODY'S
ESTIMATE. THIS PAGE DESCRIBES THE ORDER OF SCARCITY, WHICH THE MARKET PRICES, AND STATES NO QUANTITY AT
ALL. FAN MADE GUIDE, NOT AN AUTHENTICATION OR VALUATION SERVICE. IF A CARD IS WORTH ENOUGH FOR THE ANSWER TO
MATTER, SEND IT TO A GRADING COMPANY AND LET THEM PUT THEIR NAME ON IT. LAST REVIEWED
AUGUST 17, 2026.
![Charizard [1st Edition] #4, Base Set](https://storage.googleapis.com/images.pricecharting.com/gmkd37jg7haprczl/240.jpg)
![Charizard [Shadowless] #4, Base Set](https://storage.googleapis.com/images.pricecharting.com/ym4hvnapxhl5iuny/240.jpg)
