If you know me, you know I love Doraemon. That “Stand by Me” set was gorgeous and includes some completely insane card types – like diamond encrusted and leather cards! I ended up buying another box right away. This set is not on that level, although it is sold for nearly the same price! This one is pretty weird. I don’t think it’s a straight-up cash grab the way that 8-pack Chainsaw Man set was – but it isn’t much better. Get ready for more Doraemon cards.
Table of Contents
The Box
The box is very plain. There isn’t much else to say about it, and that’s being generous. There is some artwork on the top of Doraemon jumping. That pops out to make a retail display of sorts. There is also the words “Veranea con Doraemon” – this is Spanish for “A Summer with Doraemon”. While that is a perfectly reasonable title for a trading card set: 1) Why is it in Spanish? 2) What? 3) Who?
That’s it for the box. There is a little bleed from the front artwork onto the sides – but nothing else. No label, not even some made up fake label like DCEU has – just nothing. The print quality is also not great, you can see from the scan of the top up there – it is low resolution. Like they designed an image at 72dpi and then printed at 300 or something like that.
I ordered this from my favorite vendor, C1LUXURYACC Store at the kind of expensive price of $25.00. The box did come with a hit pack, a really weird hit pack, and then 12 regular packs. This puts it into the same 10-yuan price range as excellent sets like Star Wars.
The Set
Maybe you were hoping something about the fliers, or the pack might help explain this thing – well no, sorry. The set is numbered as “LIRENCH0-888” which seems meaningless. The flier does list a manufacturer as “梦卡社” and “Manko Card” – but that lead me exactly nowhere. So who knows, maybe this is another doujin-style cash grab product after all.
The set is reasonable large, according the flier at least, there are 9 XP cards limited to 399 each. Then 18 SEC level cards followed by 9 SP. The SEC level is something like “Shadow” card, it isn’t clear what that means, SP is labeled as “Silk Printed”. SSP is next, which is like Doraemon characters on money, not real money but you get the idea. SP is just character portraits, 11 of those.
QR is not chibi in this set, but rather costumed cards. There are a bunch of other levels like black and white manga panel cards, astrology cards – 1 for each sign, and pixel-art cards. Also a set of puzzle cards, those are always rough cause they don’t do anything unless you get all of them. I’ll save the weirdest level for the next section, since I did get one of those ones.
The Doraemon Cards
The cards all suffer a bit from the DPI issues we saw on the front of the box, particularly the back of the cards. There are also tons of alignment and centering issues as you can see in that manga panel card above, it’s titled, that’s slightly different on every card so I don’t think it was intentional. Either every card has a unique art back, or I managed to pull all unique rarities from the first pack – all my cards have different artwork on the back.
The card numbers are just insanity, nothing makes sense, it’s not using typical R/SR/SSR and it isn’t even using the things from the flier. Like that manga card has a number “MH” but it is apparently CR rarity in the flier.
I did a QR which is one of the nicer cards. It has full color art printed on it and a very simple foil coating – no texturing or anything fancy. Also see the thick white outline around Doraemon on this card? This makes me thing this was a very cheaply done photoshop job. I mean modern photoshop literally has a tool that would have cut that out perfectly. My guess is it doesn’t blend well with the background and this was the “solution” lol.
Sorry if I’m being harsh on these. I do appreciate all trading cards, and there is a lot to learn here about what can go wrong in the design or printing process for a set. I just kind of wish they weren’t selling this for the same as the Stand by Me set. Let’s look at one more card and then move onto to something cooler than this.
Ok, so this apparently a hot card. This was the card I got from the box promo pack. From the flier it seems like this is the only type of card that will be in that pack and there are 30 variants. They all look like this though, that’s Doraemon’s bell but all black. This is supposed to be a heat sensitive card, meaning if you warm it up – the image appears. That’s a cool gimmick! But it doesn’t work, I tried a bunch of stuff, even a hair drier. The card was definitely hot but no color ever appeared on it.
Conclusions
And that’s probably a good spot to end this review. This Doraemon cards set was disappointing, from the box itself to the cards, to the box promo card – nothing impressed me. The heat sensitive card would be kind of cool if it worked. Still, knowing that is the only thing that can possibly be in the promo pack makes me not want to buy another one. I would strongly recommend you buy the Stand by Me set or just don’t buy Doraemon cards – but avoid this set.