Game Soul: So Many Amazing Game Characters in One Set!

If you saw my last Mail Call post you saw me unwrap this box, you were probably just as confused by this product as I was. I bought this box from AliExpress, and only a couple stores offer it. To me that says that it’s either: 1) very new, 2) very old or 3) very unlicensed. Any of those would reduce the number of vendors selling it vs like the Dragonball cards that you could get from 100s of vendors. So let’s dig in and figure how they fit so many amazing game characters in one set.

I paid basically 20$ for this, which is a lot considering most are 15$ – it’s 25% more in relative terms. It was the seeming rarity of this that convinced me to pick one up. The box itself was pretty beat up, not the worst I’ve seen but not in great shape. This damage did not happen during shipping, I know that cause I pulled this out of the inner part of a larger package — and the other boxes in that same shipment seem in perfect condition. That’s not really a problem, we aren’t the trading card box archives after all are we?

The front and sides of the box are covered in various character artwork, like Tifa from FF7. You also get a preview of some of the cards that might be inside. From the marketing descriptions this set includes characters from 18 classic games, supposedly Bandai put this product together. Everything looks professional here, but the mix of IP is so weird. How did Bandai convince Nintendo to let them use Mario for this product? The more you think about this product, the less legal sense it makes.

Just look at that poster, you’ve got Capcom, Squineex, Nintendo, Bandai, Sega and I think even some Dragon Warrior characters are here. If Bandai really licensed all this, uh, idk how. Either way it was sold to me and now I have it.

From the advertising I can tell this is a big set, there is 0 chance I’m getting even close to complete from a single box of these. There are 9 PR rarity cards, usually those are promo cards for retailers. There are 2 LR cards, this is legendary rare and is like 1 per case or something crazy like that. There are a bunch of SP rarity mini sets, and then 12 URs, 21 SSRs, 27 SRs and 36 Rs. So you’d need to buy a lot of boxes to complete this from packs — and then you’d be sitting on possibly hundreds of copies of the R cards.

Maybe the back of the box will shed some light as to what exactly this thing is.

From translating the back I learned a little bit more about this. One translation of the name is “Youhun Card Collector’s Edition”. The rest of the back are fire hazard warnings, piracy warnings, and a list of all the different IP that are in this set. So this really does seem like a well produced and kind of official thing. How crazy, just goes to show what kind of odd things are out there if you look hard enough.

The box contains 20 packs, each with 5 cards. The pack’s back is mostly repeating information from the back of the box. Alright, so this box seems like a legit product and is presented in the same way as I’ve seen all these other sets done. That’s it for now though, I’ll open up these packs and add the cards to the database next time.