Demon Slayer: Definitely Cheap, but Still Interesting

Today I’m opening the first pack from that Demon Slayer box I reviewed back here. Sometimes these boxes include a special card as a thank-you for buying an entire box. I’m also opening that pack today, it should have something nice inside!

The pack-in pouch had 2 cards in it, both ink painting like cards. The R is coated but not foiled, the SR is foiled. The numbers on the front are something like “Autumn Power” and “Summer Power”, these might be for some sort of game system. It’s not clear how you’d play it with the backs giving away each card though, but maybe it’s some kind open information game. Anyway the art is cool on these, but they feel much cheaper than the Gundam cards did. They also are much cheaper at 8 cents a card vs 90 cents for those ultra chic Gundam cards.

For what it is worth, the back of these cards also has some sort of game system information on it, life, attack order, defense and speed. The text there I could not translate well, I assume it some sort of quote or description of this character. I do not know who this character is.

The SR card is foiled, which is really pretty in real life but comes across as blue on the scanner. Again, no idea who this character is. The artwork is gorgeous though, and I guess this one has higher autumn power than the other one did so that might come in handy. Sorry for the jokes, I’m here for the art and collection aspects of this, not the fandom, mostly.

Also notice that this SR card’s number is from series 1, GM01066. The other cards are all from series 4, like that first card was GM04007. This happens a lot with these types of sets, you’ll get cards from older sets when you buy new boxes. This increases the number of dupes you end up with even more, so be ready for that. I’m personally pretty worried about this with all the SCP boxes I bought, I suspect I’ll be sitting on a pile of dupes by the end.

Moving on to the actual first pack, it contained 5 cards. 3 were R rarity and 1 was SR, I explained a bit about this rarity system over here. You’ll notice that’s only 4 cards, but the pack should have 5. There was a 5th card but its weird, I’ll explain in a bit. First the regular cards:

These 3 R cards all follow the same theme as the two from the pack-in. They have great ink drawing art and some strange game-like statistics on them. The paragraphs are all very difficult to auto-translate, to give you and example that last one from the guy with 6 eyes is this:

继国缘一的双胞胎哥哥，为鬼舞过无惨手下最

强的鬼，十二鬼月中的上弦之壹

Original Chinese

Ji Guoyuanyi’s twin brother, the most miserable underling for Gui Wu Guo Wu Mi Strong ghost, one of the winding ghosts in the month of twelve ghosts

Google translated

Not very useful, but maybe it makes sense to somebody who knows this anime? I suspect “Ghost” is supposed to be “Demon” given the theme here.

This SR card is really nice to look at. The foiling is much better than even the pack-in SR had, that fan pattern in the background is especially nice. Also the artwork here breaks from the ink painting style of the other cards. A great card overall, glad to have pulled it.

And this is that 5th card. This card is part of the redemption scheme. See how on the back there are 4 prizes, and then a grid of 9 cards? The one we got is in the upper right of that grid. The idea is you collect these and if you get a complete set of that grid -> you can exchange them for a prize. Other combinations get other prizes, but that’s the general idea. So these packs really only have 4 set cards, and then this 1 redemption card.