Demon Slayer: a Inexpensive box? Or Did I Get Scammed?

Hello Again! Time to crack open a new box so we can get some more packs into the mix here. Today I’m opening what I thought was the cheapest box I ever bought. I went back and checked receipts though and actually I fell for a pretty common scam on AliExpress. I don’t feel bad about that, but I’m going to teach you how to avoid it. This was purchased from Goddess Story Store, a very reputable store so I would still order from them again. Oh boy, we will get into Goddess Story soon, thats a whole other level of thing. For now, let’s look at some Demon Slayer trading cards!

I thought I got this box for 4$, which would have been insane. It was actually 15$, which is still a super great price – but it’s the normal going rate for this box, nothing special. What happened? The seller I bought this from is using the shipping fee trick to hide the real price. It was listed as 4$ but with an 11$ shipping fee. The funny thing is, that same exact seller also lists this same box as 15$ with free shipping – so I guess you can pick how you want to do it, but you will be paying 15$ lol.

That aside the box itself is typical of these cheap boxes, a big contrast from the luxury box the Gundam cards came in. It’s cheap cardboard, and the packs are just crammed into it, 36 packs + 1 special pack-in. Each pack will have 5 cards, so I’ll get 180 cards from this at only 8 cents a card – what a steal! But there is a trick to this deal.

This box is what is called a 1-yuan box. Look at the cover and you’ll see “1元”, that’s the character for yuan, it means a division of the whole and is the symbol for China and Japan’s currency. The 1 is like a level here, and they sell boxes from levels 1 through 10 normally, but usually you see 1, 2 sometimes 3, 5 and 10 yuan boxes. I’ve never seen a 7-yuan box for example. There is an amazingly thorough guide to all of this here based on the Naruto series, but generally this applies to all the primary Kayou products.

So why isn’t this box really as good of a deal as it seems? Well 1 yuan could also be interpreted as “Cheap”, these are the cheap boxes. The packs in these boxes contain way less rare cards then the 2, 3 or 4 Yuan boxes would contain. To give you some idea, a box like this contains 36 packs, 180 cards and I’ll get maybe 1 or 2 really good cards. If I bought a 5 Yuan box of this same exact set I’d get only 18 packs, 90 cards – but I’d get like 10-20 really good cards. I’d also pay almost twice as much. Understanding this pricing model is important before you start buying or you’ll just buy a bunch of the same cards over and over.

These cheaper boxes also almost always come with some kind of redemption scheme for real life prizes. There will be prize cards in the packs, if you find one you could take it to a store and redeem the price – like a anime figure or book. Unfortunately if you are buying overseas like I am, this redemption can get tricky. I’ve heard that you can contact the seller you bought from and they might redeem it for you, but you will be charged a lot and the process will take a few months if you can convince them to do it all. This is only worthwhile for major prizes, in which case finding a friend in China to redeem for you is a better strategy.

Demon Slayer is an anime I have never watched, I have heard of it at least. It sounds interesting:

A boy raised by boars, who wears a boar’s head, boards the Infinity Train on a new mission with the Flame Pillar along with another boy who reveals his true power when he sleeps. Their mission is to defeat a demon who has been tormenting people and killing the demon slayers who oppose it.

The Plot of Demon Slayer

I bought this box mostly because I was tricked into thinking it was only 4$, but I’m not mad as I was trying to get 1 box from every property I could so I was going to buy one of these anyway. The 1-yuan boxes are totally fine for my purposes here anyway.

OCR translation of the back:

Love to learn and refuse to steal the version.
Protect yourself and beware of being deceived.
Reasonable consumption, don’t be obsessed.|
Product Name: Ghost Slayer Blade Collectible Card
goods
No.: GM-0401
inside
ruler
Capacity: 36 packs per box, 5 collection cards per pack
Inch: 143mm128mm50mm
Target age over 3 years old
Executive standard: GB6675-2014
Manufacturer: Little Dinosaur Animation Co., Ltd.
ground
Address: No. 42, Xinyuan Road, Dongdang City, Guangdong Province
8 11 5 6 3 8 7 3 0 4 0 1 8|

Kayou is a term you will encounter a lot while learning about these types of cards. This is a company name, they are the primary manufacturer of trading cards like this in China. Kayou though is more generally used for all these types of anime cards, whether or not they produced them. This set is not produced by Kayou, it’s by a competitor named “Little Dinosaur”. They produce even cheaper alternatives to the Kayou products. That red smiling dinosaur is their logo.

Oh, and it turns out that big warning was about buying genuine product and not buying too much. I’m not going to lie, I have no idea if this is genuine but I doubt it, and I also definitely bought way too many of these. Thanks a lot warning… too late I guess.

This box came with a promo pack, that’s the purple metallic pack. There is 1 in the box and it contains a special high-rarity card, or sometimes an exclusive card you can only get from buying boxes. Often these will be missing, as it was in this box of Dragon Ball cards. What happens is the vendor searches the box before shipping and takes it, as these promo cards can be worth more than the entire box when sold as singles.

I’ll open these packs up and let you take a look at all the cards inside.