YAMS and Grandpa Oh My! Opening Duel Gundam

Today I’m opening a pack of Duel Gundam trading cards. Not all the pack opening posts will be this long, but this is the first one I’ve ever written so I did want to explain a few things. On this site I plan to open random packs from various products I purchased and stashed in a bookcase. Each time I open a box, I’ll make a post showcasing that box and trying to understand what it is. Keep in mind I can’t read Chinese and many of these cards are printed only in China so… yeah, we’re doing this.

The first pack I’m opening is from that amazing Duel Gundam box I showed off over here. The box itself was kind of amazing, so I was really looking forward to the cards. I didn’t know how many cards would be in each pack or much about the cards beyond the marketing materials, but with a box that fancy – these have to be nice right?

And boy was I not wrong! Ok, so each pack has only 3 cards — that’s kind of a bummer. But, each card is thick, like 4-5 times thicker than a typical trading card. They are all metallic embossed designs with cool foil effects. These are high quality cards for sure, I’m quite impressed so far.

The first card turns out to be a UR “YAMS-132 Rozen Zulu“, which is a suit from the Unicorn OVA adaptation. The scan here pales in comparison to the card itself, the card has a cool circuit pattern embossed on it, and lots of shiny gold foil. “UR” stands for ultra-rare, this is a designation of rarity level for cards like these from China. Everyone uses similar names, although what they actually mean differs widely.

In this gundam set there are 10 special “Max” rarity cards. I suspect you get 1 of those in a box at the most. This means at a minimum you are buying 10 boxes to complete this collection, more realistically you are buying dupes or trading with friends. I have no hope of ever completing any of these sets so I’m just happy with what I get.

After those “Max” cards comes a less-special but also “Max” rarity in gold with 30 cards. I suspect this is maybe 2-3 per box. Then you get three special rarities: “SVP”, “VP” and “SP” — these are like mini sets within the larger set. The “SP” cards for example are line drawing cards. So you could aim to collect all 12 “SP” cards rather than the entire set and maybe only end up buying 5-6 boxes.

After those we get into the standard rarity levels, these are what you get by default in each pack. Each pack is going to have 1 “UR” card, like the YAMS-132 we got here, and then 2 “SSR” cards. UR stands for Ultra-Rare, and SSR stands for Super-Super-Rare (lol, I’m not kidding). Some sets also include “SR” (super rare), “R” (rare) and even “U” for uncommon and “C” for common!

The more rarities the harder it will be to complete a set by buying boxes. Believe it or not some of these boxes are designed to have complete sets in a single box, this Gundam set is clearly not one of those. This set is designed to extract maximum cash from it’s audience, like an old arcade game – if you want to see everything you are going to be putting quarters in for a long, long time.

With that said let’s move onto the next card.

Even though this is “just” an SSR, the lowest rarity cards in this set, it still looks incredible! The green foil background is offset by the gold metallic lined drawing of the amazing “XM-01 Den’an Zon“. This suit is from the F91 series, one of my favorites to watch on long plane trips.

I’d like to also point out that the backs of these cards are just as impressive. That design is all foil with metallic lining throughout. This set has art backs, some sets would have information here like a description of the suit and pilot, but this set is focused on the metallic printed artwork on the front. The number on the back is then the number within this rarity. So this is card 21 of the SSR cards, of which this set includes 36. This means I am likely getting at least a few duplicates, but hopefully not as many as we’ll see in future higher card count sets.

Ah yes! Our 3rd and last card from this pack is the grandaddy “RX-78-2 Gundam“, the original suit from the original series. The classic red, white and blue coloring is here rendered in incredible matallic foil embossing. The entire design jumps out the card and shimmers in the light as if it were actually metal. Even though this is an SSR, I suspect this will end up being one of my favorite cards in the entire set.

And that’s our first pack opening post. I’ll go add these to the database and we’re officially off to the races. Looking forward to literally 100s more of these. Seriously, I have 50+ boxes to go through, some have 36 packs in them. This might take a while.