What a weekend! I opened 10 total boxes, nearly doubling the card count in the archives! I’m now even further behind on written reviews, I’m prioritizing card uploads instead. I had to take some time to write this one up though. I’ve been raving about it to anyone who will listen, and a few who probably didn’t care or understand what I was saying. These JoJo trading cards are fantastic, both the presentation and the cards. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure – here we come again!
Table of Contents
The Box
Now that we’ve looked at so many sets we can start to use a kind of short hand to describe things. I’m going to call this type of box a “Star Wars” box. That’s in reference to the Star Wars 2023 pre-release set, since that was the first time I encountered this type of box. These all open from the top like a jewelry box would, with magnets holding it closed. The outside is always nice strong cardboard with a glossy finish, the two shorter sides are always set in a little bit.
Once open, the lid will have artwork on it, star wars has that sweet Darth Vader piece. This one has metallic foil image from JoJo – it looks great, nearly a mirror finish on it. Usually in these types of boxes there is then a plastic tray with two recesses to hold stacks of packs – typically we’re seeing 10 – 12 regular packs and 1 “hit” or box promo pack. “Big Blue” JoJo trading cards switches that up just a little bit…
Haha, well it isn’t quite that nice. The above picture is exactly what jumped into my mind though when I opened it. That is a Panini Flawless case. This is a special product line they put out that is guaranteed to include top hit cards, like numbered to 10 autos, or even 1/1 cards. It’s still random, you could open one and lose money – and they cost $10,000+, even direct from Panini. They don’t have packs though, no packs are for the peasants opening mere $1000 hobby boxes. Flawless puts their cards in another little box, inside the big box.
That’s what this JoJo collection does too! It’s the first instance of this I’ve seen from these types of trading cards. I admit it, when you open and hold these it feels significantly more “premium” then a foil pack of cards ever could. You get two little boxes in here, each nestled in a nice foam insert. The foam insert also makes this feel more premium then the plastic inserts that usually come in these.
Each little box is about the size of a deck of playing cards. In fact at first I thought maybe I had accidentally bought playing cards – as they also make and sell those on AliExpress. The little boxes are each also sealed with a voidable security sticker. My JoJo trading cards box had both the outer sticker and one of the inner stickers already voided when it arrived. The outer one maybe could be shipping damage – but not the inner one. Somebody had been in this box before me.
There is more evidence of that although I’m waiting for other people to get this to compare notes. In the photos of this product the two boxes are always different colors – one purple and one white. In my box both were purple. Makes me think maybe the white one is even more of a hit so vendors are swapping it out? I could just be paranoid too, and the cards I got were all amazing – so whatever they took – I’m not missing it.
I paid $35.53 for this a few months ago from Dream Card Store, at the time I thought that was a decent price for a brand new 10-yuan level product. Today though you can find vendors, like my favorite C1LUXURYACC Store selling JoJo Collector’s Edition for just 16$! A few of us over on the r/AliExpressGameCards subreddit have ordered that, I ordered 2 – we don’t yet know if it will be the same thing or not though. That’s always a risk with this type of thing, and a reason that a lot of people prefer to pay local sellers on Ebay for more of a guarantee.
The Set
The flier for this set is not as long as that completely insane Doraemon set – but it is still impressive. I put the “M” category up there, that’s like stained glass window artwork, I will include the full flier with the box entry in the archives. This is a big set, and you only get – it says 36 cards – but I think I’m only going to end up with 24. But my box has two purple boxes, so maybe the white box would have 24 cards in it? Really not sure on this stuff, gotta wait for more people to share their openings to confirm things.
This is a set with some amazing possibilities in it. There are pure gold and silver cards in these boxes – NOT redemptions, you can just pull them. That’s likely why vendors are searching and swapping things out. You can also pull Z rarity enamel medallion cards. These have a beautifully designed enamel piece embedded in the card – you can remove it and wear it on it’s own if you wanted, and you were lucky enough to pull one.
Moving on from those treasure levels of rarity – I still can’t believe there are solid gold cards in these boxes, wtf! – anyway, there are other cards too lol. There are some awesome 25th anniversary – I think sketch cards? Or somehow related to the actual artist, I had trouble translating this one. Lenticular tarot style cards, SSX level cards are numbered to 255. IR cards are also metal – just not precious metal – and I actually pulled one of those, that should help you believe this is all real. PX is numbered to 500.
Moving down to the non limited cards we’ll start with 9 SP variants – these are… wait for it… African Red Sandalwood carved cards. So they are wooden carved cards, JoJo Collector’s Edition is incredible. JO and MR rarities are some kind of mirror card, not sure on the translation. The 7 EX cards are PVC, which means they will be partially transparent. Then you’re getting into “normal” levels like 20 CP cards, 16 OR, 21 UR, and then 63 base cards.
Those JoJo trading cards are sweet though, they each depict a season of the manga with information about that release on the back. The art style on those is gorgeously framed and seeing them all next to each other is quite a treat. There really are no base cards here, everything I’ve seen I’d consider a major hit – even what they are calling base cards.
The JoJo Trading Cards
Above is the first SSR, 001 showing the first ever cover on a JoJo manga from 1987. The gold framing around it doesn’t come through well on the scanner but it shines on video. I only opened one of my two mini boxes. It had 12 cards in it. Seemed like the SSR “base” cards were to the outside of either side while the true hits were in the middle. As soon as I opened it I knew there was something crazy in there as the center card was pre-sleeved, we’ll get to that soon enough.
I regret I just can’t show all 12 cards here in this post – they will all be in the archives very soon though. This CP was the 2nd best card I pulled. Again it probably seems plain on this scanned image, but this thing shines like crazy. Those green lines behind the character art are set with foil and textured to create a kind of sunburts effect as the light moves across the card. All these cards feature a technology I didn’t know about until I researched it today: Glitter Printing.
We’ve seen glittery cards before, but it’s always been part of a foil coating. These cards aren’t like that – they have actual glitter “crystals” covering them in each of the colors. You can feel the grit of them on the card (careful not to rub it off) and it’s easy to see when you hold one to the light – it looks almost diamond encrusted. Apparently this is not that hard to do, it’s just I’d never seen it on a trading card before these.
And there it is, the center card from the mini box I opened – obviously the hit of that “pack. This is an IR rarity card, you can tell because the character on the front is inlaid with purple. The true precious metal cards have no color on them. This is only listed as being a “non-precious metal” on the flier so I don’t know exactly what. It feels heavy and cold though, so different from any trading card I’ve held before. The detail on it is exceptional and it does fit into a 55pt toploader perfectly.
Conclusions
Am I happy with the JoJo Trading Cards Collector’s Edition set? YES!!! I actually had to stop filming after opening just one of the boxes it was getting to be too much for my old heart to handle. I’ve got two more boxes on the way, I don’t expect to ever pull a true hit – like the gold/silver cards – but even just getting a medallion would be a dream come true! It isn’t often you get so much pure joy from pulling cards out of a pack, usually you’re rushing through the base to get to that one hit.
This set is all hits, every card you pull is a hit. If you watch that video you see how confident I was in the 2-yuan packs at the start. Well, that did not last long. Every card was better then even the box promo from that 2-yuan set – and I LOVE that 2-yuan set. So yeah, this is another solid “Buy it right now” from me. If you wait too long, it’s your own fault.