Release the Creatures: Dinosaurs! Is the Best Set of 2026

I have opened somewhere north of two hundred trading card sets on this channel. Most of them are good. A few of them are genuinely great. This one is the best set I have ever put on my table, and I want to be careful saying that, because I say nice things about a lot of cards and I don’t want the word to stop meaning anything.

Release the Creatures: Dinosaurs! is published by Tomodachi Press, a small outfit in Pisa. It costs €155. It contains 144 cards drawn by 130 different artists. You cannot buy it in the United States, and the only reason it was in my hands at all is that a viewer in Italy volunteered to order one and ship it to me.

It made me cry. Twice. Let’s get into it.

• The Box That Shouldn’t Have Been Here
• What’s Actually in the Box
• Six Periods of Paleoart
• The Rarity Ladder
• Even the Box Is Art
• The Cards
• His Name Is Thanos
• Why This Makes Topps Look Lazy
• Then Italy Showed Up
• What the Comments Taught Me
• How to Actually Buy It
• Conclusions

Here’s the full opening if you’d rather watch me make undignified noises at Italian artwork for an hour:

Fair warning: the first twenty minutes of that video is me opening a completely unrelated $500 box and losing badly at it. If you’re here for the dinosaurs, jump to 19:23.

The Box That Shouldn’t Have Been Here

That’s the whole box. A brown carton with a sticker on the side that reads 8 bustine per box, 18 carte per bustina - eight packs, eighteen cards a pack. It looks like something a hardware store would ship you a faucet in. Hold that thought.

It’s on my table because of a viewer named Mario. This set is sold in Italy, essentially only in Italy, and Tomodachi Press doesn’t ship to the US. Mario offered to buy one and forward it to me. I paid him for the box, the shipping, and the import - I want to be clear about that, because nobody should be out of pocket for helping me make a video - and the whole thing took about a month to reach a mountain in America.

That’s the entire premise of this channel. Usually the strange stuff comes from Asia, mostly China. But we’ve opened cards from Peru, from the UK, and now from Pisa. If a set exists that almost nobody outside its home country will ever see, I want to put it on camera.

The dinosaur part is personal too. I’m an older gentleman now, but I got hit by dinosaurs the same way everybody my age did - the big picture books, the giant monster-looking things with the claws, drawn as scaly lizards because that’s what we thought back then. I read Jurassic Park before the movie came out, because I’m a nerd that way. I saw the first three in theaters. For Jurassic Park III I rode my bike twenty miles to the next town over, chained it up by the graveyard, walked to the theater, bought a ticket, and sat in an empty room. Literally the only person in there.

So when someone hands me a box of dinosaur cards nobody in my country has opened, that’s not a video. That’s an errand.

What’s Actually in the Box

Here are the numbers, and they’re ridiculous for a €155 product from a small publisher:

• 150 cards in the main set
• 130 different artists - one dinosaur each, more or less
• 30 Time Shifted cards with alternate artwork and their own layout
• 27 special cards: 9 Landscape, 9 Safari, 9 Masterpiece
• Four holographic Tiers of every single base card - that’s 600 more
• 207 unique pieces of artwork in total

Art direction is by Dario Moccia, technical direction by Davide Masella, with scientific consulting from Willy Guasti. Keep Dario’s name in your pocket - he becomes a fairly large part of this story later on.

Tomodachi Press themselves you might already know from their Cuphead series, which I’d seen floating around on eBay years ago with no idea how a person was supposed to actually buy one. Same answer, it turns out: be Italian, or know someone who is.

Six Periods of Paleoart

This is the idea that made me sit up, and I only half got it while filming because I was reading the flier through auto-translate.

The set does not simply walk you through geological time. It walks you through the history of how human beings have drawn dinosaurs, and pairs each art era to the era of animal it depicts. The border, the palette, the layout, and the illustration technique all change together:

• Heroic Period (1830-1890) - the Triassic, in etching, wood engraving and ink
• Classical Period (1890-1930) - Early and Middle Jurassic, in oil painting and mezzotint
• Modern Period (1930-1969) - Late Jurassic, in watercolor and colored pencil
• Renaissance (1969-2010) - Early Cretaceous, in pen and marker
• Postmodern Period (2010-present) - Late Cretaceous, technique restrictions off
• Future (today onward) - the mass extinction, where the artists are simply allowed to go feral

The Heroic Period ones are my favorites and I didn’t expect that at all. They come out looking like old tintype photographs and Victorian sideshow bills - hand-lettered, black and white, with the animal presented as a spectacle. The Most Colossal Beast Ever on Earth! That’s the whole card. It’s perfect.

Then you get to the Future cards and someone has drawn something I genuinely had to search for the dinosaur inside of. Same set. Same box. Same pack, sometimes.

Every card also credits its illustrator on the front, and the back carries real information about the animal. It’s in Italian - point your phone at it, it takes two seconds - but the information is there, which is more than most licensed sets bother with.

The Rarity Ladder

The flier explains its foil treatments with little diagrams instead of a wall of legal text, which I wish every publisher on Earth would steal immediately. What’s in here:

• Tier C / B / A / S - four holographic versions of every base card. Silver holo, marble holo, a reptile-skin holo with a glossy/matte drip-off effect, and then Tier S: a black card with metallic gold ink and rainbow holo details. That’s the “black and gold” I lost my mind over on camera.
• Time Shifted (30 cards) - the same dinosaur, usually by the same illustrator, redrawn in a different period’s style, with its own layout, magma holography and metallic decoration. Six per box.
• Landscape - a fold-out card that opens into a four-page brochure. One per box. Mine looks and feels like a little leather folio.
• Safari - photographs of physical 1:1-scale dinosaur models staged in real environments.
• Masterpiece - the Giovanni Caselli series, printed on 450gsm uncoated laid paper with a hot-stamped signature. They feel like canvas. Three per box.
• Fossil - memorabilia cards containing real, catalogued, certified dinosaur fossil, from Titanosaur eggshell fragments up to a baby Tyrannosaurus tooth. Serialized, with a handful of 1/1 specimens.
• Printing Plates - the actual metal plates, four per card, one each for C, M, Y and K.

I said out loud on camera that this set had no photographs of dinosaurs in it, and then pulled that within about four minutes and had to eat my words. It’s a physical model, built at scale, photographed in real undergrowth, and presented like a naturalist’s field snapshot with the name written underneath by hand. Who thinks of that?

Fossils and printing plates are case hits, not box hits, so we didn’t get one. If we had, this would have been a 12 out of 10 instead of an 11.

Even the Box Is Art

I assumed the brown carton was a shipper and the real box was inside it. There is no box inside it. That is the box.

Every interior surface is illustrated. You fold it open and there are painted panels on all four walls, and the cardboard support at the bottom is printed to look like a pond. There’s a set list card tucked in there too.

Laid out flat it’s a single continuous painting with a Tyrannosaurus coming at you through the middle of it. None of this needed to happen. A plain brown box would have been completely fine - it was a plain brown box, from the outside. They did it anyway.

And then the wrappers. Eight packs, six distinct designs (I got two duplicates). Different animal, different art style, different color on every one. I have opened a lot of boxes in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever opened one where the packaging was worth photographing.

The Cards

The black and golds look plated. There’s embossing on them too, so the raised areas catch the holo differently from the flat ones. That’s a Maiasaura on her nest, rendered in gold ink on black stock, and it photographs terribly - which is usually the sign of a card that’s actually doing something in person.

The foiling is smarter than it looks. They print it in two layers so the animal doesn’t get swallowed by the holo - the same trick Kayou pulls on their high-end stuff. The subject stays legible while the entire background goes wild behind it.

And the Time Shifted mechanic actually works. That’s Carnotaurus sastrei twice. Same animal, same illustrator, redrawn as if it came out of a different decade of paleoart, with the card number set in the same font so you know they’re a pair. Nobody in the Western hobby is doing this. Imagine a baseball set where the 1952 design and the 1989 design of the same player both exist as separate pulls, on purpose, as a chase.

Some other things that happened: a card where the animal smashes out through its own name plate. A storm scene where the foil does most of the work. One that could pass for a Hokusai print. A Diabloceratops, because dinosaurs have the best names in science. A stegosaurus with blood spatter running across the top of the frame. Bonk, the bony-headed one - that is not his name, that is what I called him when I was six. And a large amount of what I can only describe as derpy dinosaurs, which are my favorite genre of dinosaur and which this set has in real quantity.

Then, in the seventh pack, the one I’d pointed at on the flier forty minutes earlier: the graffiti Tyrannosaurus. Red, furious, name scrawled across it like spray paint. It’s the image at the top of this page and it’s still my favorite card in the set.

His Name Is Thanos

This is the one that broke my brain a little.

A little short-armed guy with a goofy smile and rosy cheeks, standing in the rain under an enormous purple moon. Adorable. Comically vestigial arms. And the name printed on the card is THANOS SIMONATTOI.

That is not a joke the artist made up. Thanos simonattoi is a real abelisaurid from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil, formally described in 2024. The genus really is named after the Marvel villain. The species name honors Sérgio Simonatto, who found the vertebra. And abelisaurids are precisely the family famous for those useless little arms, so the joke lands twice - once as a Marvel gag and once as actual anatomy.

That’s the thing about this set. It isn’t only pretty. You learn something off the back of a card, you go look it up because it sounds too dumb to be real, and it turns out to be completely true.

Why This Makes Topps Look Lazy

I said it on camera and I’ll write it down: if you’re a designer at Topps or Panini or Upper Deck, hang your head. And I know that’s unfair. I know you work under absurd constraints, with a licensor reading over your shoulder and a checklist that got decided by someone in marketing who has never held a card. But at minimum, take some of this to your boss and see what happens. Even one time-shifted subset in a baseball product would be the most interesting thing anybody did that year.

The closest comparison I’ve got is Kickstarter sets. I used to open RRParks sets constantly, and Richard’s stuff has this same streak in it - an actual human deciding what a set should be instead of filling in a template. But those never reached this production level. What Tomodachi Press did here is take Kickstarter-grade creative freedom and hand it Topps-grade money and printing.

There’s a quieter thing in here too. This is 130 human artists, each handed one animal and one period style and told to go. You can feel it in the pile. I’m not going to turn this into a lecture, but go ask an image generator for anything as good as that Thanos card. It won’t get there today. It will probably get there once it’s looked at enough work like this and learned from it, which is a whole separate conversation - one I got into properly in how unlicensed sets actually get made. For now, humans have the edge, and this box is 144 pieces of evidence.

Then Italy Showed Up

Here’s the part I did not see coming.

Dario Moccia, the art director on this set, is also one of the biggest streamers in Italy. A few days after this video went up, he sat down and reacted to the entire thing on stream, and then his audience came over here in a wave.

He opens with something like “there’s an American holding this box and I have no idea how he got it - I swear I’ve never met this guy,” which is accurate. I hadn’t. It is a very strange and very nice thing to watch the person who made the thing you just opened watch you open it.

About 800 people subscribed in two days, then another 1,500 after that. What came with them was a vocabulary I had to be taught. Dario’s community has a catchphrase - “de pefforza,” his dialect squash of per forza, roughly “obviously, no other way” - and it turned up a few thousand times in my comments over about a week, alongside an apparently permanent ruling that my pink nitrile gloves are now the most famous gloves in Italy. I got adopted as several hundred people’s dad. I ended up running a giveaway called PEFFORZA because of it, and 4,444 people entered, when my previous record was around 500.

I’m not Italian, I don’t speak Italian, and I mangle the pronunciation every single time I try. The reason it was fun rather than strange is that most of those comments weren’t only memes. An awful lot of them were some version of thank you for showing this to people who’d never get to see it, which is the entire point of this channel and not something anyone usually says out loud. So: grazie. De pefforza.

What the Comments Taught Me

The other thing you get from an audience who actually owns the set is corrections, and these were excellent:

• That little short-armed Thanos card? Illustrated by the art director’s wife.
• One of the cards I flipped straight past is a photograph of a full-size woven rug that somebody actually made.
• And another one is a tattoo - put on a real human being, then photographed for the card.

I filmed for an hour on this box and knew none of that. Every time I think I’ve found the ceiling on this set, somebody points at another floor above it.

How to Actually Buy It

If you’re in Europe, this is easy. Go to Tomodachi Press - they have an official English translation of the product page now - and buy a box for €155. A four-box bundle is €620, a twelve-box case is €1,790. There’s an official binder for €35 and sleeves for €4. Just go. What are you waiting for.

If you’re in the United States it’s harder, because they don’t ship here and reshipping services are a much bigger industry in Japan than in Italy. Realistic options:

1. Find a friend, a relative, or a very generous viewer in Italy who’ll order it and forward it. That’s what happened to me. Pay for everything - don’t ask someone to eat the cost of your hobby.
2. Watch eBay for Italian sellers. That’s how most of the Cuphead sets made it over here.
3. Be extremely loud on the internet about wanting one. Apparently that also works.

I’m keeping an eye on their site from here on. If Tomodachi Press publishes anything else - even if it’s just an animal set with no dinosaurs in it at all - I’m buying it, or I’m begging somebody in Europe to buy it for me. They have a customer for life.

Conclusions

An 11 out of 10, and I’ve thought about it for a couple of weeks now and I’m not walking it back.

A hundred and thirty artists. Six art-historical eras that actually mean something to the design instead of being a line on the sell sheet. Foils printed with real craft. A fold-out card. A photograph of a scale model staged in a real forest. A card on canvas stock with a paleoartist’s stamped signature. Real fossil in the chase slots. A small purple dinosaur named after Thanos who teaches you a true fact about abelisaurid arms. All of it inside a box whose interior is a painting.

I’ve said before that the best things in this hobby usually come from somewhere nobody’s looking. This time it came from Pisa.

Thank you to Mario, the viewer who spent a month making this box happen. And to Weeb Investments - mostly a waifu-card channel, a serious dinosaur nut, and the channel that made me want to start filming in the first place. Go watch him. And if TAB / Take-Break-Cards gets a box of these, I want to see somebody finally pull that fossil card.