Failure of Reception: The first box of SCP Foundation Cards

I’ve had this site up for about a month now, reviewed a few cool sets already, opened some packs, things are moving along nicely. When I was first thinking this up I was focused on Gundam cards, but while I was shopping for those on AliExpress I kept running across these SCP cards. Now being an internet connoisseur, I of course know about the SCP Foundation. I did not know they made trading cards for it, like 1000s of them. Let’s take a look at our first box, Failure of Reception.

Secure, Contain – Protect. That’s what SCP stands for these days, originally it was Special. Containment. Procedures. Similar connotation but different words. It’s hard to believe but the Chinese language SCP wiki is incredibly active with full translations, new content and tons of readers and writers working together to build this mythos.

And that is really the best way to describe SCP, as a mythos, like Cthulhu. The entire point is that there is a loose framework within which users can tell any story they want. Some are terrifying, some gross, some funny, some sad, some have important things to say. Each entry is given a code number, like SCP-001. The page contains descriptions of the entity, place or object, sometimes photos, interview transcripts, anything we can add to make the whole feel real.

I’ve been following this wiki since it started essentially. It’s my go to reading material for airports or anywhere else I can’t do anything else. So when I saw these cards I was immediately interested. There are some youtube videos of westerners who bought these and opened them on camera, but otherwise very little information about these sets here. Hopefully I can help fix that. I bought all of them, every set, every Yuan level, I even bought the cheap-o themed binder!

Before we get too much further I’d like to stop and talk a little about authorship, ownership, trademarks and copyright. SCP is a user generated content, users just like you and I write and edit these articles. No company owns this content and no company has a right to profit from it. That said, this is the Chinese market we are talking about here, they don’t really respect this as much as you’d hope.

As we are the trading card archives we are going to hold our nose to that concept and take a look at these cards as a curiosity. If this is too much for you and you cannot put your anger aside, well I guess archiving isn’t for you.

Still here? Great! The box itself is incredibly shiny. Every surface has a rainbow foil treatment to it making it difficult to photograph. The bottom of the box is unprinted, instead the manufacturing information is on the side. This is a 2-Yuan box of SCP set 1, manufactured by a company called Camon which I can’t find any information on. I think they still exist, but only on the Chinese internet. That QR code will take you to their WeChat page which was incomprehensible to me.

The rest of the markings on the box are thematic. The big silver letters on the side are a kind of warning about how the facility is failing and everything is going wrong. The other two sides have SCPs on them. The factory, “Factory produces everything never stops”. This is one version of SCP-001, that scp designation is really complicated, but has some of the deepest lore hidden away inside of it. The other side “The Church of the Broken God” is very well known as a sub-faction in the mythos.

So these seem pretty legit content-wise at least. They haven’t commercialized or anime’d this mythos, it feels well represented here tonally and thematically. I should note, and you can see from the pictures that the box is pretty beat up. This was sitting in a warehouse in China for years and then very roughly shipped around the world to me. This kind of damage is typical and expected for these, everything is fine with the cards and all that – just expect the boxes to be beat up in this way.

Being the 2-Yuan box for set 1 means this only includes 30 packs, not 36 – but the rarity distribution should be slightly better in these packs. So you don’t get different cards in the different box levels, just more rare cards as you move up the price ladder.

Something neat that these sets include that I have not yet seen in any others I’ve opened is a set list. It’s printed on the inside flaps of the box. I cut them off and scanned them in above. You can see that there are not that many individual cards in this set, but there is a good mix of rarities and a few super rare chase cards in here too. This is nice, without this you can’t really ever know if you have a complete set of not. With those 3 different 001-SP cards though, I doubt I’ll get all 3 of those, even with the huge pile of boxes I bought.

This box did not come with any promo cards, or the vendor took that out before sending it. There are 30 packs, they feel thin and cheap like the other mass produced ones I’ve seen. These packs should have 5 cards in each. The back of the pack is mostly a retread of the content on the box.

So there you have it, our first box of SCP trading cards. Like I said I have so many of these and they are all different, some are big squares, one is huge triangle shaped box – can’t wait to open that one. This will be an adventure for sure.