I bought this a couple of weeks ago:
It’s a box of ‘Goddess Story’ cards. These are Chinese unlicensed ‘waifu’ cards featuring girls from anime and video games. Some refer to these as ‘Goddess Story TCG’ but they’re strictly for collecting only: there’s no game element.
Here’s a pack:
And here’s the five cards that were inside:
From the top left, we have characters from Love Live, Oreimo, Needy Streamer Overdose, Gundam and Demon Slayer. All the characters featured on the cards are from existing properties – 24 in total are represented in this box alone – and none of them are licensed. These cards therefore exploit the (lack of) Chinese copyright laws to use the artwork without credit or payment.
The cards are extremely high quality. They’re all glossy and well made, most of them have some type of foiling and the rarer ones are embossed and have very fancy foil effects. Even the most basic cards feel better in your hands than a Magic The Gathering card, and this quality belies the bootleg nature of this product, and is one of the reasons it’s become so popular.
There’s six levels of rarity in this box, shown above. Rare cards (the lowest rarity) are not foiled, but all the others are. The four levels about CR (SR, SSR, SER & SCR) are textured with embossing effects as well. Apparently SCR cards are very rare, and I was lucky to get even one in my box (which I haven’t finished opening). Can you identify the characters/series on the above six cards?
I first heard of these during the pandemic, and saw them available on places like Etsy about two years ago, although I felt they were overpriced at about $5 a pack. When I was in Australia earlier this year a shop at Charlestown Square was selling individual packs at A$14 each (!) which was eye-opening, so when I saw on Amazon a price of only $13 – for an entire box of 30 packs – it was time to buy in. I was so impressed I quickly purchased a few more:
Only one of these boxes cost more than $20, and it was only by a few dollars. Each of these are different sets, although the bootleg nature of the product makes it difficult to determine in what order these were released (there’s no dates and the set codes are inconsistent). Furthermore the box I have opened contains some cards not listed on the checklist at the back of the box.
At this point I’m sure some of you are shaking your heads (“He bought ten boxes?!?”) but these scratch the itch of opening trading card packs, are very cheap, and the cards are shiny and pretty! I’ll be opening these packs for years 🙂
I’ve been buying these on Amazon, and the vendors usually send bonuses with the orders. To my surprise this has included promo packs and the included cards are shown above. I like that two of these are tarot cards. Imagine the difficulty of assembling an entire deck!
And then there’s the above. It turns out other Chinese companies are releasing similar products, and I’ve bought a few of them as well to evaluate. These were a little more expensive than Goddess Story and seem to promote themselves as higher quality cards with fancier treatments (including heat-sensitivity, glow-in-the-dark and gems). As you can see I haven’t opened any of these yet; I’ll save them for a special occasion!
I’ve got over 300 packs of Goddess Story cards now. Want some? Let me know 🙂