This is Ooyama's Pikachu Its from a set fan-coined name "Vending Machine Series" due to only being accessible from vending Machines in Japan for only 1 year in 1996 They would literally come out of the machine as large slabs and you would have to "peel" the cards out The illustrator is Kouichi Ooyama (one of the original designers of the Pokémon TCG) with his signature "hand drawn" bold line style There's ~3k of these cards that exist in a PSA 8 or higher ________________________ All of these deep niche and lore reasons are why I like the card (and also why I think its currently undervalued/overlooked) Slowly learning all of these things was like learning and playing the "game" of "sifting/uncovering alpha" Thankfully this somewhat became a transferrable skill to the world of web3 / crypto