Oh man, it’s been a busy year for me..! After being unemployed for so long, it’s nice to finally be able to work again. There is only one slight problem: trying to make that money and paying off my bills means that I haven’t had much time to work on the site since I started working. Don’t get me wrong, being busy with work and making money a good problem to have… but it still pains me to no end that I can’t work on this site as often as I can, because there’s so much I want to talk about and share. Maybe I should switch to YouTube because I can make a quick video on the way to work about some crazy thing I saw about the Pokémon franchise and/or fandom… but I’m more of a research site now more than daily news. But I do want to create new content for everyone someone!
In any case, folk like you have made working on this site on-and-off for the past twenty-plus years so much fun and exciting, and I can’t thank you enough for visiting the site and helping keep the world of Pokémon fresh and exciting.
On the flip side, I am working with a lot of awesome people on the PA! Discord who help me gather research data and ideas for my eventual future articles, if not have their own awesome article ideas that they’re working on. In fact, today’s post is about just that. I’m even open to article submissions from you (yes, YOU!), so if you have an idea you want to share with PA!’s audience and the 50-ish visitors we get a day (which really ain’t that bad!), then swing by the PA! Discord and share your ideas with us. Maybe we can work something out? I can’t wait to see what you come up with! :D
The Actual News:
So back around March 2020, during the height of the human malware event… I get a phone call from someone who wanted to ask me a few questions about something I wrote on the site. My Midwest genes kicked in and I was all about sharing whatever I could to this complete stranger, because… y’know… why not?
In any case, the person on the phone was one Matt Matoba (aka Ike_Lawliet on the PA! Discord), who was doing some research on an old Pokémon TCG set. Little did I realize that that conversation would be the start of an amazing journey down the rabbit hole that is Pokémon Jamboree, the long-lost Pokémon TCG set.
Fast forward to this past week, when Matt finally released his article about Pokémon Jamboree… and BOY is it great to finally read the full story about it. It’s been well over two years in the making, and has gone through some awesome highs as well as suffered through some terrifying lows… tons of interviews with the original elite of the Pokémon TCG at Wizards—such as Mike Gills (aka “Master Trainer Mike”) and Mike Boozer (aka “Dark Master Trainer Mike”)—well as playtesters for Jamboree as well… but in the end it was all worth the hard work that Matt put into this wonderful piece of Pokémon journalism. This is truly a momenteous revelation of the world of Pokémon up there with Helix Chamber’s work on Pokémon Red/Green prototypes.
For now I wanted to share this story with everyone, but later I’ll share some of my own little tidbits about the story. For example, I’m introduced in the article saying “I’d say 99% of the information out there [about Jamboree] is from me”, and I will say, yes, I meant that. Like, a lot of the reason why people remember Jamboree is because of the Bulbapedia article that I helped work on during the Wild West-era of Bulbapedia.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy Matt’s article, and feel free to swing back to this article soon to hear other behind-the-scene tidbits, and maybe even some fakes of the playtest cards?? 
2 Comments
Hey Nick,
Thanks for sharing this – it’s absurdly fascinating.
1) The guess about the e-Card Celebi being the “Leaf-type” card in question is most likely correct. It is the only card to ever have a e-Reader ID in the form ID:A-##-a (as opposed to just ID:A-##), and the Japanese print had ID Z-04-a, and the English print had Z-04-b.
2) The guess about EX Sandstorm being the card where Crosstrainer cards finally got jumbled in makes sense. I wrote a word salad some years ago I can’t remember if I ever tried emailing you or getting into contact (as another article you made sparked my interest), but there’s something weird that happens with the e-Card ID number system for the sets EX Sandstorm (last set to ‘make sense’ in how numbers are assigned, imo) and EX Team Aqua vs Team Magma (huge gaps in the ID sequence for the M-## of the set). It’s worth remembering what we know as “EX Sandstorm” looks very different from the nominal equivalent “Miracle of the Desert” set – many EX Sandstorm cards actually got pulled from the Japanese TMvTA set*.
That the ID system starts to fall apart in EX Sandstorm and completely falls apart in EX Team Magma vs Team Aqua… if Nintendo was rushing to include Jamboree cards (for whatever reason) seems to be the explanation for the breakdown in what had up until then been a very organized system.
Thanks so much for sharing this article, this is something that has bothered me for years.
* PS many many years ago I was the person who pointed this out to you. Way too frickin cool this is where I finally get closure on this.
But that there wasn edit button for my comment! w/r/t point (1) there were SEVERAL cards with A-##-a/b, but Celebi was the only one where a was exclusive to one language and b was exclusive to another.