I’ve been collecting Camon’s SCP trading cards for about a year now. In that time I’ve learned a lot about the set, and it’s time to write all that down for other interested collectors. The SCP trading cards checklist is huge, 409 unique cards spread across 3 main sets and 8 produce releases. There are tons of rarity levels, cards unique to specific products, treatments, there is a lot to understand. Let’s dig in!
Table of Contents
Background
Before we get into the details let’s talk a bit about what this is. These are trading cards designed and printed in China between 4-5 years ago. We aren’t sure on when this was made because there are no years on any of the materials we have, not on the fliers, the boxes or the cards. No new sets have been published in at least one year though and Camon has moved onto to other properties like making Disney Frozen and Princess cards.
The set is not officially licensed. In fact this set is absolutely toxic from a legal/ethics perspective, we can’t talk about the set without talking about that. The SCP Wiki uses the CC Share-Alike 3.0 license this creates a weird legal issue, nobody owns any SCP content and nobody ever can. You cannot create any type of derivative work without also making that work open source. Meaning for this set to be “legal” all the design templates and printing specs would need to be publicly available.
So that’s the legal side, but there is an ethical element here too. This set uses “Stolen Art”, not in the sense that somebody broke into a museum and took a painting. It’s the sense that a fan created this art based on the SCP wiki, and then Camon took that artwork and published it on these cards, often with modifications, and never with credit.
Is It Redeemable?
So this sets fails to meet either a legal or ethical bar – why are we even talking about it? Well, it’s the only option. There are no other sets. Given the licensing choices around this mythos it is likely impossible to create a fully licensed product. Even the art books produced in Russia are suspect, yes the artists involved have given full credit/permission – but their work is itself derivative on the original wiki article. Even if the artist is the wiki author, they are building on top of a mythos that is CC Common licensed. It is not possible to claim legal ownership or any kind of rights over something like this.
That’s all a really long way for me to say that Yes, I get it. There are issues with this set. I understand those issues at a fairly deep level. Even so I’ve still decided to collect this set, we’re all just going to have to deal with that reality.
SCP Trading Cards Product Lineup
These products are still available, although they are not being printed any longer. This means that purchasing these products is not further supporting the theft we talked about above. Camon is not getting that money, a vendor is and that vendor is not themselves going to be motivated by that to go and produce more stolen cards.
These cards are sold in many places but the primary way to get them is through AliExpress. There are 8 boxes in the product line:
YCSR1 Products
This box featuring SCP-049 is the very first one ever printed. It’s a 1-yuan product, with 36 packs with 6 cards each. This initial release contains YCSR1 with R, SR, SSR and 4 GR cards acting as the chase cards. Being the oldest box this one tends to be the hardest to find these days.
This white upright box is the second release. It’s a 2-yuan box that mostly contains the same cards as the box above but with slightly higher hit rates. It contains 30 packs of 7 cards each. This box also introduces some new rarity levels in a new YCSRE mini-set: UR and SHC. Review Here.
This very heavy yellow box is the 3-yuan release for YCSR1. It again contains mostly the same cards. There is another mini-set here, this time YCSRT, including a few more GR and SHC cards. This box contains 50 packs of 7 cards each – so there are 350 cards in this monster!
YSCR Premium Sets
This glittery cube is the 5-yuan box for YCSR1. This is the first “premium” level product released. These packs are loaded with hits, in fact there are no R level cards in these packs at all – it starts with SR. There are 20 packs of 8 cards each. This box also has a lot of new cards, like 17 “Observer” cards, a new LR rarity level, new GRs and a reprint of most YCSR1 SR cards with a different foil treatment. Review Here.
The “Pyramid of DOOM” as I call it, this 10-yuan box is the most expensive product ever produced in this line. The box as a unique triangular shape. It contains 20 packs of 8 cards each. Has yet another foil treatment in it and lots of new rarities focused on SCP-001. Like new LRs and GRs, MLR above that, and a series of ZR “clue” cards.
YCSR2/YCSX
This box is technically YCSR2, a new designation. However it generally contains a mix of old and new cards. This is a 1-yuan box with 36 packs of 6 cards each. Often when I try to order the original “Brown” box – I’ll be sent this instead. There are cards only found in this box though so don’t ignore it.
And then we’ve got YCSX. These are also SCP cards made by Camon however they have a completely different style to them. These cards are physically larger than the others and have different framing artwork. It’s almost like this is the sequel to YCSR1. This is the 1-yuan box with 36 packs.
This is the 2-yuan box of YCSX with 30 packs. The YCSX set has completely different design and art from the earlier sets. It includes R, SR, SSR, UR, SP, CP and GR rarity levels. Review Here.
For completeness there are also a few different binders available. These are very cheap, 4-slot plastic binders. There are at least 2 designs that I’ve seen. Each comes with a promo card, but that card will be an SSR from either YSCR or YCSX depending on the binder. The promo is not exclusive to the binders.
Sets and Mini Sets
With some idea of the various SCP trading cards available, lets talk about what you can find in each one. As we saw above the set started out with YCSR1. That’s the primary designation, and the first 5 boxes all use it. They expand upon it though in interesting ways. For example the 2-yuan box adds a set of 4 new GRs and an entirely new rarity level: SHC. That SHC level is then only found in the 2-yuan box.
This happens again in the 3-yuan box and then is greatly expanded upon at the 5 and 10 yuan levels. Each new box includes more cards in the base set as well as new set designations like YCSRS, YCSRT and YCSRW. These “mini” sets are a part of YCSR but only found in specific boxes. YCSRT for example can only be pulled from the 3-yuan yellow boxes, nothing else.
Completion Advice
Completing a set will require buying all of the 8 boxes, at most you could skip out on the very first box as everything in that is reprinted elsewhere. Otherwise each box has unique cards found only in that box. For example the MLR is only in the 10-yuan packs. At the same time the more expensive packs skip early rarities like R entirely – so you cannot complete this with only premium boxes.
Further some rarity levels are very rare, like “UR” is especially rare here. Even after having opened nearly 100 packs from all 8 boxes I’ve only ever pulled 1 UR. Just 1. On the other hand I have 38 copies of the “faceless sheep” card. So if you set out to complete this set be ready to deal with an OCEAN of duplicates. You will be ripping entire boxes looking for a single card at some point. Beware.
Card Variety
Time for the fun part, lets take a look at some cards! With the caveat that I’ve never pulled an SP from YCSX or the MLR from YCSR’s 10-yuan box. So I can’t show you those, everything else is here though:
First up we have our simplest card, the rare or ‘R’. This card is number YCSRW1-037 and features SCP-5033 also known as the “faceless sheep”. You’ll notice that I’ve got two versions of the card back there? See how one has the Camon logo in the lower right and left? The other doesn’t? The one with no logo is the original print of this card, it has no foil treatment on it either. The one with the logo has a foil treatment, that is the reprint.
R Rarity
Above are the two SCP trading cards fronts, left is the original and right is the reprint version. It’s subtle but look at the dark area at the top and bottom of the card – notice that the right side card has a kind of “Star” pattern here? That’s the foil treatment, much easier to see on video or in person. So this card really has 2 versions with identical card numbers. As a collector you have to decide how to deal with this. Will you keep both versions? Personally I keep the “best” version of each card, which means the foil version if I have it.
Above is a different type of “dupe”. In this case it’s the same SCP, SCP-093 but on two different cards. Left side is YCSR1-041 from set 1, right is YCSR2-022 from set 2. So here you see that even though the two cards feature the same SCP at the same R rarity level, they come from different sets, have different art and different treatments. This happens often, in fact there are 3 different version of the GR featuring SCP-049, each is a totally different card.
SR and SSR
Moving up to the next rarity level, SR, we see a similar treatment variant. The original SRs have a simple foil on them, just foil nothing fancy. But the reprints have a digital/cubic/pixel foil treatment to them, kind of looks like pixel rain in the light. These two version also have the same card number so again you have to make a choice as a collector on these.
Moving up to the SSR rarity level we start to see highly customized treatments. Rather than just covering the card with a single sheet of foil – these are all customized. Embossing, different types of etching, multiple foil layers – all of that printing tech is on display. Also these are not reprinted in the way that the R and SR cards are. There are no cases of the same SSR card number with two different foil treatments, although there are cases of the same SCP appearing on multiple SSR SCP trading cards.
UR/GR/CR Rarities
Moving on up we have the one and only UR that I’ve pulled so far, this is card YCSX-UR-005. It comes from the YCSX set, and featuring O5-1 the first member of the O5 counsel that runs the SCP Foundation. This is literally Eve, as in Adam and Eve – that Eve. It’s a cool looking card with some very nice etched foil in the snakes and apple icons.
GR is the top rarity level from the initial release, all other rarities were added in later sets. The two examples above are from later sets, the SCP-173 on the left comes from YCSRW, the 5-yuan box. On the right we’ve got a cool looking green “Siren Head” from YCSRT. All the GRs in YCSRT are tinted green like this. In YCSRE the 4 GRs are printed in black and white.
The two CRs above are examples of the 17 “Observer” cards included in the 5-yuan YSCRW expansion. All of these feature line art on a chrome background. The art is all by an artist named SunnyClockwork – although remember this was stolen, uncredited usage of their work. Generally every 5-yuan pack will include one of these cards so it won’t take too long to complete this level. Only the 5-yuan glitter box has these cards.
Special/Exclusive Rarities
The SHC level is a little different, rather than featuring famous SCP or members of the foundation – this level features events from the foundations history. It was first added in the 2-yuan box and expanded later in the 3 and 10 yuan boxes. These are horizontal cards and feature some intricate foil graphic design alongside the image.
Next up with have the “CP” level introduced by the YCSX set, this rarity sits between SSR and UR and features just a little less printing tech than the UR level. This is another rarity where I only have 1 total card from the entire level so far so I can’t say too much about it yet.
Then we’ve got the ZR cards. This special rarity level was added exclusively in the 10-yuan box, no other boxes contain these cards. They all feature that awesome pink/red border and a ton of etched foil to augment the artwork. So much so that on some of these you can’t really tell what the original image was, it’s just foil now. These all feature different versions of SCP-001. There is no official SCP-001, rather there are 36 version that all could be true. The foundation purposefully obfuscates SCP-001 and these cards mirror that aspect of the mythos.
ZR/XR – Cashing SCP001
To go alongside those sweet XRs, the 10-yuan box also contains this unique level: XR. These are SCP-001 “clue” cards. If you translate the text on these they are like clues as to which of the 36 SCP-001 entry is the real entry. Despite the cool gimmick, these cards are kind of plain. These cards won’t be revealing the truth, that’s a secret the Foundation keeps hidden.
My final card to show you is at the LR rarity level. This card comes out mostly white on the scanner, but that looks like shining gold in real life. There are 5 total LRs in the series, this one and then 4 more added in the 10 yuan box.
Conclusions and SCP Trading Cards Checklist
So, there you have it, a complete tour of the SCP Foundation trading cards set published by Camon. It’s a truly weird thing in the trading card world. From a subject matter perspective, legal, ethical, design – really any way you look at this set it’s unique. And that’s what we love about it here at the Archives. Hopefully you’ve learned a bit about the set and maybe even consider getting your own box to rip!
If you are curious to see a complete checklist of all 409 cards, we’ve got that hosted over here: SCP Checklist If you’ve spotted any error or something missing from our guide please get in touch and let us know – Happy collecting!
It is remarkable, rather the helpful information