Pokémon TCG fansite PokéBeach has secured fairly the discover. It’s an inside video from The Pokémon Company that reveals, in never-before-seen element, precisely how a Western Pokémon card is created, from their preliminary design to proofing and printing. And for those who love these manufacturing facility pictures of things getting mass produced, you’re in for a deal with.

This inside video was apparently created for workers at each The Pokémon Company International, and Millennium Print Group—the cardboard producer The Pokémon Company introduced its intention to buy earlier this 12 months. My guess is it was filmed round 2017, given the units featured all through are Sun & Moon’s Ultra Prism and Forbidden Light. In the movie, the corporate particulars the method of how a brand new set of Pokémon playing cards is created, from the textual content lists of names and strikes despatched to them by the Japanese card makers, all the way in which to the bodily packs in folks’s fingers.

There’s one thing type of extraordinary about seeing the clean playing cards on a pc display screen, with their attributes being typed in, proper onto the cardboard. It appears like one thing that ought to solely be doable by a wizard who lives in a volcano, quite than a diligent crew forensically checking every card for errors on their screens. But it solely will get extra spectacular because the video goes on.

Those textured playing cards (at all times the simplest giveaway for crappy fakes) are so elaborately sophisticated to create! Every ripple and line seems to be meticulously laid out on pc, matching the route and sample to particular sections of every Pokémon’s physique, after which as they unfold out into the remainder of the cardboard.

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There’s just so much detail in here, and such insight into how a set gets translated and constructed for the English-speaking markets. There are countless versions of the Ultra Prism logo design scrolled through, seen from its original sketched phase to the final packaging. You can see how many people are involved in every single step, different voices chiming in on messages asking for tiny tweaks, or how a particular design can receive OKs from most, but still get rejected by one department. Above you can see a possible list of rejected names before “Ultra Prism” was decided upon, although it does look heavily staged for the shot. Still, we can all lament we never saw Ultra Galactic.

Then comes the printing, and oh boy it’s so satisfying to watch. Not just the impossibly huge sheets of the rarest cards being fed into giant chopping machines, but the intricacy with which they are checked at ever stage. They even have a special little metal stick for measuring the borders on the cards. (Surely something anyone who’s lost out on a grade 10 due to “centering” can only become enraged at.)

It even goes into details about the TCGO code cards, and how those QR codes are checked. But sadly doesn’t get into why the hell they reveal whether a pack will contain a good pull or not.

Sadly, the one thing it doesn’t give away is how the selection of cards that enters a booster pack is done. It does show the giant machines that do the job, but there’s no explanation of how it all works.

There are a ton of fun numbers, too. TCPi’s production facilities in Durham, NC, produce 26.62 million cards per day, on a 120-foot-long printing press that cost $8.5 million. Meanwhile, 2.5 million packages are produced a day to put them in. And a good job too, given there are 10 per pack.

Oh, and we must not forget the full-on Raiders of the Lost Ark vibes of the warehouse where the packed cards are stored. Every single one of those larger boxes contains (by my observation) 72 packs of six booster boxes. The camera pans to reveal this is just half the warehouse. By guesstimating, I’m seeing around 2,000 of those larger boxes. At around $140 a booster box, we’re looking at $120 million of Pokémon cards. Yikes. Who else has an idea for a heist movie?

What a fantastic insight, and let’s hope Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have the sense to realize it’s one well-worth being left online to promote their product.