A Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Lapras looks like it went swimming in blood, and the card next to it on the print sheet came out the same way. The red is not ink. It is the tape the factory uses to join one roll of holo foil to the next, and this sheet was supposed to be thrown out before it ever reached a booster bundle.
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The card belongs to Brehella, a collector who specializes in Pokémon misprints. Their Sunday post, titled “Bathing In Blood,” passed 650 upvotes on r/PokemonTCG within a few hours. In their words, Lapras “looks as though it was splattered in blood from the death of the Spheal that is barely visible beneath Psyduck.”
Holo Splice Error Lapras: Bathing In Blood
byu/Brehella inPokemonTCG
Red splice tape got laminated onto the cards instead of being pulled
Holo foil comes on huge rolls that get laminated to sheet after sheet of card stock. When one roll runs out, the end is taped to the start of the next one so the line keeps moving. Sheets that pick up the taped join are meant to be pulled and destroyed. This one slipped past quality control.
Most of the card’s ink would not stick to the tape. The parts that survived are the ones printed over an opaque white base layer, which is why Lapras, Psyduck and the 30th Celebration Pikachu stamp still show up in color while the background turned red. Brehella says this splice also joined the wrong type of foil to the roll: the top of the card has diagonal holo lines, while the bottom has the plain, patternless foil you would normally see on a reverse holo.
Lapras and a Halloween Meowth were neighbors on the same sheet
The Lapras has a sibling. On Halloween, Brehella posted an Alolan Meowth with the same red tape, captioned “Halloween Horror,” and it reached about 3,800 upvotes. Both cards were pulled from booster bundles by the same person, a day apart. Brehella had already bought the Lapras when the Meowth turned up, and bought that too. Placed side by side, the red lines up, so the two cards were neighbors on the sheet.
On the Meowth, the black ink held where the color did not, leaving a sharp outline of the balcony and building Meowth stands on, and the classic Kanto Meowth in the art is only faintly visible. Brehella estimates that only around 10 cards on this sheet were hit this badly.
The same collector already owns a blood Mew and a burning Salamence
This is not Brehella’s first red splice card from 30th Celebration. In September they posted a Mew special illustration rare they call “The Blood Mew,” from a sheet where the tape stretched across two rows of cards. By their count, that sheet produced about 10 Mews with tape at the top and 10 with tape at the bottom, and they own both bottom-tape copies seen so far. A day before the Mew, they posted an “Inferno Salamence” with the same kind of error.
The r/PokemonTCG comments have already given the new card a name, “Bloodpras,” and one reply says it has “such Akira vibes.” Another expects someone to start chasing a full 30th Celebration “bloodbath” master set. Brehella posts their error collection daily on Instagram, including a video of the Meowth.
