Chainsaw Man again? I don’t really mind, it is a well produced and funny show – although extremely gory and a bit fan-service-y if you know what I mean. As you and everybody else sadly knows: that absolutely wonderful Big Face Studios set has been sold out for a while now. I don’t know if they’ll ever reprint it – but if you do jump on it, that’s a really cool set of cards. This however, well this Chainsaw Man 8-pack box is cool in it’s own little weird way.
Table of Contents
The Box
This might be the shortest “The Box” section I’ve ever written. There is not much to this box. I remember when I first took it out of the shipping package I noticed it felt “Cheap”. The box is very thin, with no real coating on it, if you spilled water on this it would soak right through. That’s true for some of the 1-yuan boxes I have – but this is a 10-yuan + offering.
There isn’t much information about this on AliExpress, the label doesn’t help a ton either. The manufacturer is G+ Fashion, at least that is what is printed on the box in english. On the back it’s listed as “G+ 潮玩出品”, searching for that leads to mostly small toys and other types of cheap products on the typical drop-shipping sites, nothing I could really learn from or even verify.
The other picture up there is the pack. It looks weird, not at all like a typical pack of trading cards. It’s paper, and very wide, twice as wide as a standard pack and half again taller. That is what is sold as a “Heat Seal Bag/Pouch”, for example these are for sale on Amazon. You use a cheap heat clamp to seal the bottom once you put whatever you want to put into the pouches. In this case they’ve printed on them, but still these are not bespoke foil packs like we’d expect.
The Set
We already see hints of a garage kit product here. When I use that term, I’m taking it from the model making space, Gunpla in my case. You can buy the official Bandai kits and they are great to build. Fans also produce their own little kits, either add-ons or full kits. These are typically cast in resin and maybe 10-20 are made. They can be fun to work with, but also frustrating as every piece is essentially hand man. It lacks the precision and tolerances of proper factory production line.
There is another things about garage kits, they are expensive! A Bandai Sazabi Ver Ka will be ~120$ or so, while a fan resin kit may be 1200$ – or more even. That’s because the fan making that kit lacks scale, they can’t buy resin at industrial quantities – they pay retail. They have to hand bake every single piece cause they don’t have a resin curing line to run them through 24×7 like a factory would. All this increases the price.
What does this have to do with the of Chainsaw Man 8-pack box cards? Well this is essentially the garage kit of trading cards. I’m not seeing much here they couldn’t be created in a garage with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment. If they produce a few hundred sets they make their money back. Since Big Face was sold out everywhere – this product appeared to fill that gap in the market. I’ll never blame anybody for trying to make a living – and all the great trading card companies started this way.
The fliers for this set look great, clearly they have some decent graphic designers on staff. The art though is mostly from the manga but tweaked in small ways. Looking through the flier again now there are a lot of red flags, mostly in the NSFW nature of some of the cards – a true licensed product likely wouldn’t include that or it limits sales to 18+, even in China. This product is labeled as being for 6-year old and above – so I’m guessing no regulator actually approved this.
The set distribution is pretty standard with 6 ZR at the top, some QR chibi cards, SHR cards, all the way down to 29 base cards at the R level. The NSFW cards are in the SP and SSP levels, so they will be pretty rare. Generally everything will be rare given the card count in this set vs what you get in a box. Each box contains only 8 packs, no hit pack, and each pack is 3 cards. So you’re getting 24 total cards, I paid $23.80 for that – don’t be like me, skip this one.
The Chainsaw Man 8-Pack Box Cards
Now garagey-ness and price aside – if the cards are stellar we can look past a lot of those shortcomings. Unfortunately, while they are well printed cards – they are not high quality cards. In the video I show this much better then these scans can, but the cards are roughly cut. Each card is a slightly different size, and all are much smaller than a standard Kayou sized card.
When I say roughly cut, I mean the edges of the card look almost like they were torn by something. An old gravity style paper cutter might do that and would be the sort of thing a cost minimizing company would use. Real factories either stamp the cards out or die cut them out, this seals the edges giving them a nice smooth and clean feel. The edges of this cards are unsealed bare cardboard, you can see the layers through it.
The set also uses generic back designs, I’ve seen that black one used for R and SR, while the QR I pulled has a red design to it. If you reverse image search the QR card you will see that is is a stock image printed on a ton of Chainsaw Man merchandise. This art was not created for this set.
Conclusions
While this Chainsaw Man 8-Pack box was interesting to take a look at really rough home made set like this, it hurts to pay 20+ dollars for it. I haven’t gotten that third set yet, the 12 pack one that is likely made by the same group making the Star Wars and DC sets. Once I do I’ll review that one, but for now I would hold off. Clearly people in China are catching on to the trends here and creating fast and cheap products to meet market demand when things go out of print. Don’t buy this one.