Dragon Ball: Why are There so Many of These?

Ah Dragon Ball – I know no real details about this property. Sure, I know the memes and I’ve certainly seen various clips and highlights over the years, but I’ve never sat down and really watched it. I couldn’t tell you who the various characters are or any of the storylines. So please don’t look for that here, this is more about the cards and what you are getting for your money. So let’s take a look at some Dragon Ball Trading Cards!

Right after I got the first shipment while starting this project I realized that I had focused too much on my own personal tastes. I had only purchased cards that appealed to me, but to really create a good survey of this area of the hobby I would need to branch out. I also need to to “test buys” of vendors on AliExpress to check their shipping quality, or if they will ship anything at all. So I put an order in at Child’s Taste Store, they mean like “Things children would find interesting” not “How children might taste”, translating Chinese is difficult.

In that order I got three boxes, three 1-yuan boxes – so very cheap, like 12-14$ a box. I didn’t know as much back then as I know now so I pretty much picked these at random. I knew from shopping around that most stores had entire categories for certain properties. For example Naruto always has a category in every shop, and there are even some shops dedicated only to those cards. You can even buy and sell singles in the USA at some retailers, it’s that popular.

So I grabbed a random box of 1-yuan Naruto, a box of One-Piece and this box of Dragon Ball Z. I remember this shipment arriving in a box and in pretty rough shape. I don’t re-order from vendors who ship in boxes for this reason. I only re-order from vendors who ship using the bubble-wrap cocoon technique as seen in my recent Mail Call Articles. Speaking of which I need to do another one those soon, I know one of these has Batman cards in it.

The box looks and feels very similar to those Demon Slayer cards I reviewed a while back. The printing quality is great, but the cardboard is cheap and there is no foil treatment and certainly no embossing. Nothing like that Star Wars box – that was almost an art piece on it’s own, then again those were 3x as expensive. This is the 3rd series, which is what the side with Goku on it says. Like I said I didn’t know much back then and picked this at random from the many cheap box options.

The make a lot of these, not as many as Naruto but a lot. Every few weeks I’ll see a whole new set or other type of boxed product from the Dragon Ball universe pop up on AliExpress. So even though I may not know much about this, it is clearly quite popular, and the cards do look really cool in the marketing fliers.

If you know anything about this series you probably think of the over the top fight sequences, and from the fliers it seems like the cards certainly include that. This series, series 3, has 8 SP cards – I’m unlikely to get any of those in this 1-yuan box unless the promo pack has one. Then 10 UR and 10 CP, looks like maybe art style mini sets, 20 SSR, 26 SR and then 32 R. There are also 2 secret cards, but I’m very sure I won’t see those in a 1-yuan box.

This is another “Little Dinosaur” produce, so it includes a real-life produce redemption scheme. There will be prize cards in this set, and if you get the right amounts of them you can trade them in for the products on the box, like a pendant or a statue/figure. These schemes are essentially worthless to us in the west as no AliExpress vendor will help with this unless you pay way more than the item would be worth. But, if you have friends in China – maybe you could get lucky?

The box back has all the familiar manufacturers markings and an anti-counterfeit warning. I should mention again that I just assume everything I buy from AliExpress is counterfeit, if it isn’t – that’s great! In the case of the SCP cards it wouldn’t even matter since all the art and content is stolen from users in the first place. Anyway, this just says this is set 3 again, the LZ-0301 is that, the 01 is because this is the 1-yuan box.

The packs look and feel just like the Demon Slayer cards. This box did include the promo pack, which was nice cause I hadn’t tested this vendor before and this was really cheap. Usually if the box is even 1$ cheaper at one vendor it means you won’t get the promo cards from them. That’s just some of the risk here, fortunately we aren’t talking about very much money to start with.

These packs each contain 5 cards. If it is like Demon Slayer though, I expect one of those to be a redemption information card – so you really only get 4. I’ll open these two packs up and get those cards into the database next. This is our 10th box by the way, that’s right I’ve opened and reviewed 10 boxes since starting! To celebrate I’m planning to rank them all in a top 10 post coming soon, that should interesting.