With the box review out of the way, it’s time to crack open one of these packs. These are trading cards based on the SCP wiki, yes that user-generated mythos about supernatural things and the people who study them. The SCP Foundation is a fictional group that secures, contains and protects any supernatural things, entities, places or events. Users contribute stories to the wiki to build out the universe. Let’s see what these SCP trading cards have in store for us today.
I won’t mention this is in every review, but I feel its important enough to say again. The fictional universe these cards come from is created by regular users like you and me, they were paid nothing for their contribution. The company who printed these stole that content, and often the artwork that went along with it, and produced these sets. I’m approaching these as a tribute to the mythos, however I can see how some would wish these didn’t exist. If that’s you, I’m sorry, but we are the archives and we are going to catalog these along with everything else.
The pack I opened was a 2-Yuan pack, that’s a label referring to it’s price or quality maybe depending on how you want to translate that concept. A 1-Yuan box is the “cheapest”, it will have the most packs – usually 36, but each pack will have less rare cards, the entire box may not even contain the most rare cards at all. To get those you have to buy a higher level of pack, 2-Yuan, 5-Yuan or even 10-Yuan these days.
This pack had 4 R, or rare, cards and one SSR, or super-super-rare card. The first R depicts SCP-009. The image is taken from user artwork associated with the original post. The back of the card has some information taken from the wiki, along with some common framing artwork. It’s nice that this company put some effort into these frames and putting the descriptions together. Even if this is stolen content, at least it is well presented vs like the Game Soul product as a counter example.
SCP-009 is a kind of a viral ice. If it touches regular H20 it will corrupt it to be like itself along with any other water it can get to from there. So if it were to contact a human, it would take them over entirely as we see on the card. This is classified as a Euclid danger level, since it would be really bad and very difficult to contain if it got out of the lab — but it wouldn’t end the world the way a Keter might. Don’t worry, you’ll pick up on all this language as we go along.
I can’t always do this but I did look up the artist on this one using reverse image search and it was created by Jennifer Swan. This is what I mean now. This artist created that art and I’m guessing doesn’t have a licensing agreement with Camon for it’s use here.
Next up is another R, this time for SCP-178. This object is the 3d glasses itself, not the monsters. The glasses allow a person to see the other world that these monsters live in. Knowing about that other world puts you at risk, so these are also classified as Euclid. The wiki post for this one is I think a great general example of SCP content in both subject matter and tone.
This next R card depicts “Eye Pods”, or SCP-131. Not all SCP are dangerous, these are just little pods with eyes that behave like house cats. Sure they are weird, but they are not dangerous. In this case the foundation is not protecting the world from them, but in fact protecting them from the world. By giving these entities a safe place to exist, the foundation is helping both them and us to live as normal a life as possible.
Our last R from this pack is SCP-008, these early SCP are interesting to read now as they both set the tone for everything else but also have a different feeling danger-wise vs later articles. Take this one, this is the proverbial Zombie Plague in SCP form. If this got out, we’d all turn into zombies and humanity would be over. Yet it’s classified as Euclid? I guess because it is pretty easy to contain, just don’t let it out, please god, don’t let it out.
The 5th card in this pack is an SSR, or super-super-rare card. It has much better foil treatment vs the other cards, although you can see the banding in it up close. Generally these are not high quality cards like the Gundam ones, or the Ghibli cards. These feel cheap, bend easily, I think they are just coated cardstock without any core. Still I didn’t pay much for these, only 16$ for the entire box.
Our last card is SCP-1440, or “The Man from Nowhere”. This mysterious figure appears, won’t answer questions, but wherever they are bad things start to happen. And bad things continue to happen to everything and everyone around this man until there is nothing but this man left. As such this entity is classified as Keter, meaning possibly world ending if not contained.
So there is our first pack of SCP trading cards. I hope you enjoyed seeing them as I have, no joke, well over 300 more packs to open. This might take a while.