I love the SCP mythos, I’ve been reading that wiki for many years, whenever I’m traveling this is my goto reading material for airports and hotels. The creativity and variety of content is simply incredible, but it still all somehow fits into this big grant mythos. It’s like if a few thousand people co-wrote The Lord of The Rings over 20 years. Today I’m opening a pack of trading cards from the second series: SCP Forgotten Monsters.
This set contains a lot of reprints from the first set, but a few interesting new cards too. More importantly this pack I’m opening today is a 1-yuan pack, this is a measure of how much it costs. Stores don’t literally sell these for 1-yuan, well sometimes, but it’s more like a ranking of quality. You pay more for 2-yuan boxes, get less packs, each pack also has less cards — but you get more of the better cards and less dupes. With 1-yuan, you save some money and get way more total cards, but you will also be getting a ton of dupes.
When you see these types of cards on drop-shipping sites like AliExpress, you need to carefully read the descriptions or look closely at the marketing materials. Usually what you are seeing is a single set of cards, being sold 3 or 4 different ways. If you just want a lot of cards, get 1-yuan, if you want to complete the set someday, but higher levels, even though you get less cards. Alright enough background let’s take a look at what we got today.
In this pack I got 5 R and 1 SR. So I got 5 R from this 1-yuan pack whereas the 2-yuan I opened before had 4 SRs and 1 SSR in it. There might be 1-2 SSRs in this entire 1-yuan box. The difference can be dramatic, even though the cost difference is just a few dollars per box. The first card here is SCP-3903, Fata Morgana. This is the idea that if you skip a stone on the ocean at night, the reflective rings of light point a path to the secret city.
Notice the design and framing of this has slight differences vs the Rs from set 1. Even the reprints use the new frames, making them seem new even if the art isn’t.
Next up is SCP-162, this is a mass of sharp things and fish hooks that makes people want to touch it. If they touch it, really bad things happen. Note that the cards include the “level” of this SCP, this one being level 3, this isn’t in the wiki all the time so the publisher of this set added that in many cases. Also the relative power meter on the card front, that orange bar with 530 next to it. This is another metric the publisher added. It’ll be interesting to see how the various SCP rank in their mind.
Note that this card is actually a set 1 card, you can tell by the numbering on it near the top “YCSR-1”, the others are all 2. Even so it is printed with the framing design of set 2, not the design of set 1. So this isn’t a straight up dupe, this is closer to like how TCGs will reprint the same card over and over with slightly different art – how many lightning-bolt cards does MTG have? I’ll have to wait until I actually have the same series 1 and 2 card to put them side by side.
This next card is very playful, just like the eye-pods we saw last time. Remember that all this are is essentially stolen, the original creators were paid nothing for this and didn’t give the rights to have their work published in this way. Alright, that aside, this is SCP-261 – a vending machine that can vend anything you can describe. It’s kind of like stable-diffusion for vending machines. Cute artwork here, I wish the original artist was credited or something at least on these.
Our 4th card is one I recognized right away, this is SCP-206, this is a mars rover missing that went a little wrong. Everything seemed ok, but once the rover started sending photos back — they weren’t of the right spot, or the right things for Mars. This story is especially well written I think with a lot of great spooky atmosphere to it.
This one I don’t remember ever reading, SCP-2273 seems to be based on the concept of Venom from the Marvel universe. He’s a regular guy who gets attached to an alien parasite, the parasite then creates a shell, like an entire outer body, around the guys regular body. It then fights and stuff like that. This SCP seems very similar.
My 6th and final card is especially creepy looking. This is SCP-321, a very creepy one indeed – not in the “It’s going to kill me” way, but more in the “This is a very sad story” way. Another reason I love this mythos is you get that variety, scary stories but also funny ones, or sad ones, or mysteries, every genre exists somewhere in here. I’ll get these added to the database and then it’s time to pick what our 10th box to open will be.
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