Alakazam's Archives: The $360,000 Blastoise... With a Magic: The Gathering Back?!

Alakazam's Archives: A Tale of Two Titans

Welcome back to Alakazam's Archives, your premier hub for the weirdest, rarest, and most fascinating lore in the Pokémon Trading Card Game! Today, we are blurring the lines between two absolute titans of the tabletop world.

Imagine pulling a classic Holofoil Blastoise, flipping it over, and instead of seeing that iconic blue-and-yellow Pokeball design, you see the brown, oval logo of Magic: The Gathering.

No, it's not a playground fever dream, and it's not a cheap counterfeit. It is one of the most important pieces of TCG history ever discovered: the 1998 Blastoise Test Print.

The legendary Blastoise MTG Back Test Print

When Two Worlds Collide: The WotC Connection

To understand why a Pokémon card would ever wear a Magic: The Gathering disguise, we have to travel back to mid-1998. The Pokémon TCG was a massive hit in Japan, and The Pokémon Company was actively looking for a Western partner to localize, print, and distribute the game in English.

Enter Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the creators of Magic: The Gathering. To pitch their vision of what an English Pokémon card would look like, WotC's development team created a handful of prototype "presentation" cards.

Here is what makes these test prints so incredibly unique:

• The Card Stock: Because WotC was already printing MTG cards, they simply loaded Pokémon designs onto their existing Magic card stock—complete with the standard Magic: The Gathering card back.
• The Foil: The holographic layer used on these Blastoise test prints is identical to the foil WotC was using for the Urza's Legacy Magic set.
• The Design: Unlike the final Base Set we all know and love, these test prints featured a distinct gold border and utilized Ken Sugimori artwork that was previously only seen on Japanese promo cards and the cover of Pokémon Blue.