What are the Pokémon Center New York promo cards?

On November 16, 2001, Pokémon Center New York opened at 10 Rockefeller Plaza: the first Pokémon Center outside Japan, and only the third in the world. For the opening, Wizards of the Coast produced two promotional cards that were never distributed anywhere else. Promo 40, Pokémon Center, a Trainer card showing a computer rendering of the store's own second floor, went to visitors who brought a special invitation postcard (a commemorative book was the alternative gift). Promo 41, Lucky Stadium, shows Pichu riding Pikachu riding Charizard over the Manhattan skyline, the opening's mascot trio, drawn by "Big Mama" Tagawa; the Japanese Lucky Stadium had regional art variants, but this New York print is English-exclusive. The store's general manager later pointed out what the artwork quietly preserves: one of its Poké Ball landing strips sits on a World Trade Center roof, in a picture finished months before September 2001.

The store kept dealing in exclusives. A year later, promos 51 and 52, Rapidash and Ho-Oh, appeared in versions stamped "Pokémon Center NY," and Japan answered its own store's cousin across the Pacific with a Tokyo promo, 019/P, commemorating the New York opening. The shop itself closed in January 2005 and became Nintendo World, which makes its four English cards a closed set: everything Pokémon Center New York ever stamped is on this page's shelf.

One collector's caution belongs in the record: the pair is famous enough to have been counterfeited, and CGC has publicly caught fake Pokémon Center and Lucky Stadium cards submitted for grading. With cards whose whole distribution was one room, provenance is the hobby.