{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/same-picture-ten-times-the-price",
  "slug": "same-picture-ten-times-the-price",
  "title": "Same Picture, Ten Times the Price: A Buyer's Guide to the Twins Our Scanner Untangles",
  "summary": "Lost Origin printed two Volos from one illustration and they trade ten to one. Base Set and Base Set 2 Poliwrath share one painting and trade about two to one. Fossil Moltres has a Japanese twin, and sellers mix all of them up, sometimes innocently. Here is the twin field guide, from the machine that tells them apart for a living.",
  "section": "Buyer's Guide",
  "published": "2026-08-28",
  "readMinutes": 6,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [],
  "tables": [
    {
      "title": "The twin classes, and the tell that separates each",
      "columns": [
        "Twin pair",
        "The trap",
        "The tell"
      ],
      "rows": [
        {
          "Twin pair": "[Base Set Poliwrath](/card/base1-13) vs [Base Set 2](/card/base4-15)",
          "The trap": "identical art, $38.87 against $18.62",
          "The tell": "set symbol; 'Base Set 2' number 15/130"
        },
        {
          "Twin pair": "[Fossil Moltres](/card/base3-12) vs its JP printing",
          "The trap": "same art across oceans",
          "The tell": "language marks; [the JP gap study](/articles/same-card-two-oceans)"
        },
        {
          "Twin pair": "[Volo 169](/card/swsh11-169) vs [Volo 196](/card/swsh11-196), Lost Origin",
          "The trap": "ONE painting, regular vs full-art",
          "The tell": "the collector number in the footer"
        },
        {
          "Twin pair": "Shadowless vs unlimited [Base Set](/set/base%20set)",
          "The trap": "same everything but a shadow",
          "The tell": "the drop shadow on the art frame"
        },
        {
          "Twin pair": "Celebrations Classic replicas vs originals",
          "The trap": "1999 art, 2021 card",
          "The tell": "the Celebrations 25th mark"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "Why twins fool everyone, including software"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Twin pairs drawn from the scanner's real disambiguation classes (the same cases certified in our 159-case accuracy gate). Price relationships recomputed 2026-09-22 from the per-card tape at its first reading after publication, 2026-08-30, because the pre-publication points for these cards no longer survive in that tape: Base Set Poliwrath $38.87 against Base Set 2 $18.62, a 2.1x gap rather than an order of magnitude, and Volo 169 at $0.25 against Volo 196 at $2.70, a 10.8x one. The title's ten-to-one belongs to the Volo pair. The Volo footer-arbitration case is documented in [What the Scanner Sees](/articles/what-the-scanner-sees). Not financial advice."
  ],
  "terms": "Figures are moonstone's own recorded measurements, dated as published. Quote them with the population stated beside them. The article at `url` is the human form of this file."
}