Why Trading Cards… What is even going on here?

How do you write the first post for a site like this? This isn’t really a blog, not really a product review site, kind of a trading card database – but not THE trading card database. I guess I should start by explaining why I picked trading cards, and then why the specifically weird ones you’ll be seeing on here. So let’s start with why trading cards?

I grew up before the internet, well maybe with the internet is more accurate, although we didn’t actually get it at our house until I was in my early teens. So in my childhood we had to play with real physical toys, legos, G.I. Joe, He-Man and other retro stuff like that. We read comic books, and more importantly we all dealt in trading cards. Our parents would buy us packs and we’d all trade them to try to get complete sets, or at least our favorite ones.

Some kids like sports cards, baseball cards, but my friends and I preferred what were called entertainment cards back then, today we call them Non-Sports cards. These would be trading cards based of entertainment franchises. I remember specifically collecting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set from the first movie. I would bike to the gas station and buy a pack every weekend on allowance day. Then we’d all trade out our duplicates, sometimes you’d have to trade 10 or more dupes to get somebody to give up a rare card.

That nostalgia is what inspired this adventure, my new hobby. I want to open packs again, but I don’t want to pay a lot of money to do it, and I want to open things that will surprise me. Things I can go and learn about. Stuff I think is cool, like giant anime robots!

So I started looking for the cheapest sealed product I could find. I did not care what the cards were based on, movies, shows, things I couldn’t even read, only cheap unopened product mattered. I ended up on AliExpress, as all great product searches eventually do. A few hundred dollars and a month later I’m now sitting on a treasure trove of some of the weirdest stuff you are ever going to see.

Some of this stuff is known to the west, some of it is even from here – old game cards, but even those are going to be odd things you likely never heard about. Things nobody else is documenting or collecting publicly. Some of the things here you will find even the faintest mention of anywhere in western media, you’d have to search Baidu to even get started.

I’m going to open these. One pack at a time, chosen at random from this literal pile of unopened boxes behind me. Each new box will get a post carefully documenting what it was, where I got it, and any other interesting stuff I can dig up on it. Each pack will get a post showing off the cards that were in it and any interesting stuff I can learn about them. Then the cards will be put into sleeves and a binder for safe keeping.

Some of these are probably counterfeits, I know for certain that some are cause they are blatantly sold as such. Definitely most of these are not licensed for western audiences. You’re going to see characters from all kinds of anime franchises mixing together in ways their owners would never allow. In China foreign copyright is more of a suggestion then law, and so they make these. I bought them, imported them, and now I’m going to share them with you.

So get ready, we’re going to start with some very cool Gundam trading cards and then move onto even stranger things. Did you know they make a trading card series for the SCP Wiki? Did you know they made 9 different boxed sets based on SCP mythos? Did you know I have every single of them in this pile back here? Yeah, buckle up, this is going to get weird.