I went through my collections and amongst the puzzle cards I came across this card. I had totally forgotten it. I guess I've received it in some random ebay lot several years ago.
It has Rothus printed on the front side and an event invite on the back. It is square cut and same size and like as a regular puzzle card.

Are you guys familiar with this kind of cards? Where was it given out and are there other cards like this?

Would love to learn more about that! It might be an inofficial product since it doesn't have numbering like regular puzzle cards. Or they might have chosen leave it out.

This is interesting.


Sadly the edges of the card are in bad shape, so it is harder to determine whether this is an intended print or not as generally these types of misprints have slight whiting near the rounded edges or slightly different tones of black on the border. At the bottom it looks a bit like the card ended and there is whiting indicating the start of a new card or the Rothus was not properly centered and scaled onto the puzzle card.

It seems odd since the base cards have rounded edges while the merch cards are purely square cut so mashing those together doesn't harmonize very well. I have never seen it before (I have seen square cuts but not a card supposed to be square cut mixed with one which is not) and it terms of printing are to be kept strictly separate to avoid common cutting errors so I hardly doubt this would ever happen on accident and if it was an accident I am sure we would've seen this by now just by how common DM-01 as a set is.

So I'm guessing it's an intended print, however it wasn't in casual booster rotation. I think this was a promotional piece to celebrate the release of the set or starter deck which would make sense as Rothus was one commonly shown if not the most shown creature from it and this would also explain why it has merch on the back and square cut as this would turn it into merch itself separate from the main cards and also why there are so few of them. For a card like that it is rather low quality simply because it was low quantity and they didn't care enough making it proper (likely to avoid additional costs and/or because they didn't plan the release of such a card ahead in the first place).

I know Pokemon has so called 'Staff Promos' given to sellers for buying entire cases of special sets or something like that (those are foil cards with a golden STAFF logo printed onto them, but apart from that they're indifferent from the regular I think). This is probably the closest I can compare this too.

I'd be interested in buying it in case you wanna sell, mainly to get a better look at it as the bottom of the card looks indeed odd and is something I'd like to closer investigate. However I cannot give you too much for it since it's in bad condition and not a confirmed misprint at all. As long we have no confirmation what this exactly is I highly recommend you to keep it in a sleeve and preserve it as well as you can. If this turns out to be a misprint after all, this would be a DM unique one which is a huge plus for this card. I don't think it would be as valuable as an artist proof, a window cut or an albino as the change primarily affects the backside but it would definitely grow in value substantially.

I've never seen that item before, so I'm rather interested in it.

From what I can see, it seems to be advertising a tournament held at a UK Tesco store. So if I were to guess, it was handed out as flyers to promote that event. http://www.retailconcessions.co.uk/locator/get/tesco-swanseamarina

It doesn't seem to be a specific tournament like the 5Civilizations Tournaments or the JDC tournaments, but more like an introduction to Duel Masters. The UK equivalent of the US "Learn to Play Day", which was held at Toys "R" Us stores probably. There's a few comments in the following link about the tournament, but nothing about the flyer. https://www.pojo.biz/board/archive/index.php/t-167053.html

In any case, I'm interested in trading or buying it.