Mail Call! Why is Tifa on this Mysterious Box?

Hello! Today I thought I’d show everyone what it looks like to receive a package from an AliExpress seller of these cards. How do they pack these so they survive the cross-ocean journey, do they survive? Also what exactly did I order here, why is Tifa on this mysterious box?

The thing with these packages is they take about a month to get here. That’s a long time, I often forget exactly which is which and the AliExpress site doesn’t help much. This package was listed as combined with another shipment, but it seemed like it was combined with itself and it only has half of what I think it should have so I suspect another will arrive in a few days with the other half.

I ordered this set of boxes from a seller I haven’t used before, always a risk – but if I don’t test new vendors I won’t find new sets to collect. This seller is “Anime Card Store“, a popular and well ranked store . You have to be careful with that as, like everything these days, AliExpress ratings are easy to game. What I do is go read some reviews and see if they seem real or if they are all just cut and paste copies. It’s usually not too hard to tell who’s really selling products, and who is just pumping up a vendor rank for some kind of scam.

This shop sent me these the same way I’ve seen all the good shops do it. I say “good shops” as there are bad ones, I’ve ordered from a few and we’ll talk about that when I get around to reviewing those boxes. But this store did a great job. What they do is just wrap the boxes directly in bubble wrap, all the way around. Then they wrap that with an almost tarp-like, but very thin, material that survives the shipping process significantly better than any box a vendor has tried to send. Boxes always end up crushed, or half open with things falling all over, but these bubble wrap things – they always make it over in great condition!

You can already kind of see what I got in this package, looks like 4 boxes. Let’s do a quick photo reel of those boxes for now. Later I’ll do a full review of each. Remember I have a lot of these to go through, over 30 unopened now. If they make it, I probably have it here.

Starting with the most boring box here, I almost didn’t buy this. In fact I’ve had boxes from this series in my cart multiple times and then removed them. I have less than 0 interest in this set, but you know me – gotta catch em all! This is “Victor’s Versus” a TCG based on the League of Legends universe. I don’t know if this ever came out in the west, maybe it will someday – it is very popular over there like everything else from that game. It’ll be a while before I crack this open, even the Identity V seems more appealing to me right now.

Ok this is cooler, Transformers! And not those silly movie ones, these are based around the anime designs. The marketing material for this set looks incredible, the cards really look quite amazing. Who knows if they will live up to that in person, but we will find out whenever I get around to reviewing this one.

Well, uh, how can I explain this… I wanted to see a little bit of everything that is out there. This means I picked up cards that might feel a bit odd for somebody like me to pick up. These are My Little Pony trading cards. There are a few sets of these, and a new one was just released this week, but this is the oldest set I think. It’s a 5-yuan box which I hope means we’ll get some cooler cards out of it. The neat part are all the official Kayou markings so you know this is not a counterfeit. In my experience the more of those you see -> the more likely it is a counterfeit. Then again who knows if any of this is actually licensed properly.

Final box in this shipment is a very odd thing indeed. I found this on only this one shop, which means its either old, rare, or too unlicensed for the other vendors to deal with. The series is called “Game Soul” in marketing, and is advertised as including cards from 19 classing gaming franchises. I see from the box we’ve got Final Fantasy, Mario and Gundam? What’s the connection here. One of those belongs to Squineex, the other to Nintendo and the last to Bandai. All three of those companies are notoriously strict in enforcing their trademarks.

I’m actually kind of excited to open that last one, now I remember it was the reason I even put an order into this shop in the first place. But I’m out of time for today, until next time.