Topsun Seal Gum 3

Top Seika’s 1998 Toppu Seal Gum 3 is a 196-piece release: 176 non-holo seals plus 20 prism holos. The 176 split evenly into 88 grey-border seals carried over from the first print run and 88 blue-border seals added for this printing. 24 Pokémon were printed in both borders, so the two groups cover 152 different Pokémon between them.

Mew and Togepi sit at set positions #151 and #153 on the blue side. Those are checklist positions, not Pokédex numbers.

The border on the front goes with the back: a grey-border seal carries the back whose copyright line sets its interpuncts wide, and a blue-border seal carries the tight-set one. Both backs on this set are Toppu-branded. A third back, printed with the older Topsun wordmark, is found only on grey seals and belongs to their 1997 first print rather than to anything on this page; that reading rests on seller photographs and typed sources rather than on a specimen photographed with its 1997 pack.

This checklist previously listed 323 rows, built by filling both borders with a complete Kanto run. That was wrong. It now lists the 196 that a photographed collector checklist of the set enumerates item by item, so 127 rows were removed: 126 of them were the surplus half of a pair where only one border of that Pokémon was ever printed, and the last was Unown, which appears nowhere in the 196-piece enumeration and nowhere in the first print run.

Unown is removed for lack of any record rather than on positive evidence that it does not exist; if a genuine Unown seal from this set turns up, it goes straight back. No surviving row, photo key or contributor credit was changed. The border tie now rests on direct evidence from both sides rather than on elimination.

Two sources carry it: a published collector checklist of the 1998 set and the matching one for its 1997 first print run together fix the 88 / 88 / 20 split and name the grey roster, and the 1998 checklist photographs both faces of every sticker, so all 88 grey fronts sit over the back whose copyright line is set wide and all 88 blue fronts over the tight-set one. Graded stickers from sellers unrelated to that checklist tie the backs to the borders on the physical item: a PSA-slabbed Blastoise No.009 labelled Blue Border carries the tight-set back, a Charizard No.006 from the same seller labelled Silver Border carries the wide-set one, and a CGC-slabbed Fearow No.022 shows the same grey and wide pairing. The archive behind the checklist is named in the research record rather than here.