Category: Collecting

90s-Era Trading Cards

April 20, 2025

Last year I purchased four old packs of trading cards. They’ve been aging for over six months now and it’s time to open them and see what’s inside…

Tools released these The Rocketeer cards in 1992 and they’re typical of most of their series from that era. The plastic wrapper had become brittle and disintegrated a bit upon opening.

The pack contained the eight photo cards shown above, and they’re all a bit dark and muddy to my eye. Interestingly I saw this film for the first time last year, didn’t think it was very good, and I would have had zero interest in these cards upon release even were I still buying cards then.

The backs of the cards are a little difficult to read due to lack of ink. All of them were like this; maybe it was a production error? As I’ve said before I prefer the synopsis extracts on the backs of sets like this, although for this film I wonder how many read them?

There was a single (non die-cut) sticker in the pack as well, and it’s this somewhat boring movie poster style art. The adhesive had completely failed after 33 years, and when I peeled it off it wouldn’t stick to anything.

Overall a by-the-books set for a somewhat mundane film. I don’t think too many were enthusiastic for these cards when they released.

I’ve not heard of ‘Star Pics’, the company who released these Alien 3 cards, also in 1992. This was a famously troubled film production, and the result divides fans to this day.

Much like the previous packs (and admittedly the film), the cards are muddy and quite ugly. They’re also thin and flimsy, which indicate a low budget product. The screenshots are a bit blurry, which is unfortunate considering they would have been the feature cards of the set.

The backs are ugly and hard to read, but they tell a first-person account of the events of the film. An interesting approach that I think works well, but I wish the design had been more suitable for the theme.

Like other early 90s sets there’s no chase cards, and the budget feel of the material is probably indicative of the publisher. But this set is notably worse than the original Topps Alien set from over a decade earlier, which shouldn’t have been the case.

From 1996, this is a pack of Independence Day cards from Topps. We’re in the chase card era now, and the wrappers says I have a 1 in 9 chance of a hologram card!

I didn’t get one. The above were the six cards in the pack, and you can see they’re in a 16:9 aspect ratio which Topps used for their ‘Widevision’ cards for several years back then.

This is a very poor set. The screenshots are all blurry and pixilated, which is unforgivable in a set that is focused around displaying the images at a larger size. Some of the cards even look like they were photographs of a screen, rather than taken from film stock. Awful.

Furthermore, every card in the pack had ‘edge wear’ along the bottoms, which was likely caused by the machines that cut them. This is of no matter to me now since they’re going directly into the recycling bin, but imagine paying a premium for these packs 29 years ago and finding all the cards were damaged?

A very disappointing product, and another example of how Topps had fallen by the mid 90s.

I got this 1990 Classic WWF pack for KLS about a year ago and today is Wrestlemania so it seemed a good day to finally open it. She’s got a large collection of wrestling cards but since Topps sets have become overpriced she no longer buys any new ones.

Every card in her pack was A-rank wrestling royalty, which is amazing considering the size of the set (>130 cards)! How are there no forgotten or C-rank guys here?

The answer was poor collation. In her 15 cards she actually got 1-14 (and 136), and since card sets like this usually put the ‘big guys’ at the front, she got all the biggest stars. This is objectively bad collation, but in this case it ended up giving her a dream pack 🙂

The photos and bios are good, and the cards sturdy and well cut. This is a high quality product, and I imagine was quite popular with wrestling fans 35 years ago. I’m curious about the other 120 cards, but considering the steep price of the individual packs these days (I paid $10) I’m sure we’ll never open another.

I’ve still got a few more packs stashed away aging in a closet, and three unopened boxes of 1980s era cards. Over the summer I’m sure I’ll finally open one of them 🙂

Ultraman Cards

March 9, 2025

I bought this in Japan:

It’s a box of the initial set of the new Ultraman card game! Even single packs of this was difficult to find in Tokyo, and I only saw boxes for sale in Nagoya. It wasn’t very expensive; about $30 for a sealed box of 20 packs.

At the time I hadn’t seen the English language cards for sale in the US, but in the last month or so packs of both the original set and the first expansion turned up at a local comic store. I bought every pack I saw, and opened them all.

The cards aren’t particularly attractive, and the first set in particular is heavy on images taken directly from the TV shows. It only features Ultras taken from the last couple of decades (no Showa era Ultras at all) which is ok, but I wish it was more art-based and less photographic.

The cards themselves are well manufactured, made of thick stock with a premium feel compared to other TCGs. The chase cards are beautiful, with the ones I pulled having metallic effects, rainbow foiling and embossing. But they’re spectacularly rare, and in about 40 packs (including all my Japanese ones) I only got one (of 40) ‘AP’ cards, and no SP, SSSP, UR or ExP cards!

I don’t know how to actually play the game, since I’ve failed to find any of the starter decks for sale here in the USA! Almost no retailers have them, and sellers online ask silly money. Hopefully I’ll get them one day and see if the game is fun 🙂

As I said this is a brand new TCG launched recently (with some fanfare) by Bandai. It’s a little surprising since Bandai have so many other TCGs on the market including Battle Spirits, which recently released these two Ultraman expansions:

There have been several Ultraman expansions for Battle Spirits over the years, with these two being the most recent, with the blue one in particular only being released last December. Kristin got me a box of each for my birthday.

The red expansion box came with a single card box topper promo pack (which I haven’t opened) and the set contains 69 cards in four levels of rarity. With 20 6-card packs, how much of the full set could I get?

I can’t play this game, and the cards are very wordy and entirely Japanese but they’re so pretty! This is the level of design the official Ultraman game needs in my opinion.

All the cards (even the commons) are embossed, foiled and plastic coated making them all feel like thin credit cards. And these packs are significantly less expensive that Magic packs, which asks the question why is the quality of Magic cards not at this level?

The blue expansion box included a box-topper and a promo for the new Ultraman TCG, which I found amusing. This set has 75 different cards once again in four levels of rarity.

The cards are the same high standard as the other set, and the rare cards just as spectacular:

I’ve only opened a few packs of each, and will probably finish opening the over the next few months. Even though I can’t play it, I like these cards much more than the official TCG, and I wish it were these ones that had been translated into English 🙂

Postcards From Japan

February 23, 2025

All told I sent us 36 postcards from Japan, and the reason I’ve waited on this post is that six of them have yet to arrive. I haven’t given up hope since after my last trip a handful of cards took three months to find their way here but I don’t want to wait that long so let’s review a selection of the ones that have arrived today.

Fuji postcards are very common, and it’s extremely likely I’ve sent you one or more over the years. The image of the Shinkansen speeding in front of Fuji is iconic, and I’ve bought and sent many cards depicting this over the years. The bottom left card is one of several 1950s-era Japanese postcards I obtained at a postcard show last summer, and you’ll see several more of them in this post.

Geisha are iconically Japanese, but aren’t exactly common. And yet they still print postcards of them, which I usually buy since they’re colourful and pretty! We saw a geisha in the wild many years ago in Kyoto. She boarded a bus in full makeup and dress, and it was obvious she was a curio even for the locals. The leftmost card shows a ropeway in Hokkaido, and I should have saved it for a future trip…

The graphic Nagoya postcards were found at a post office, which was a relief since I’d had difficulty finding other postcards in that city. The one on the bottom right came from the zoo we visited, and the bottom left one was found packed with a VHS tape in my attic during a recent cleanout. It’s over 30 years old, very flimsy, and I’m surprised it survived the mail 🙂

Every day I sent us two cards, and as usual the messages were usually a general description of what we did that day on one, and some specific incident or event on the second (like what we ate or bought). This may seem mundane, but after doing this for almost two decades it’s fun going back and reading these tiny diaries.

The bottom left one came from the Alice in Wonderland shop in Nagoya with the tiny door we had to squat down to enter. It’s a lovely card and I should have bought more of their unique designs. Postcards are still very popular in Japan and it’s not hard to find good ones, which is why I was puzzled at the apparent lack in Nagoya.

These were purchased from a tiny store in Asakusa that sold mostly photos of celebrities from decades ago. This is a weird type of Japanese shop that doesn’t have a real western equivalent (maybe I’ll blog about one some time) but I was happy and surprised to see they had a small but incredible variety of (dated) pop culture cards as well!

I sent us two lenticular cards, and the Christmas one in the middle is one of them. Sent on Christmas Day, this described the fun we had shopping the otaku shopping district (Osu) in Nagoya. On the right is our new years card. I sent 14 new years cards on January 1, in four designs. Most depicted cute snakes, but as you can see ours didn’t 🙂

As I understand, you’re not technically allowed to mail shaped postcards in Japan. And yet they print them, and I’ve sent many over the years and they all arrive. Gotochi cards (special souvenir postcards sold at post offices) are shaped as well, and I’ve now sent myself two over the years and neither have arrived. I wonder what’s special about gotochi cards that prevent them from being mailed internationally? (The above card isn’t a gotochi, but was purchased from a popup shop showcasing work by the artist.)

Here’s the other lenticular I sent us. It’s massive: easily one of it not the largest card I’ve ever mailed. It’s more than twice as large as a normal postcard, and I put a bunch of extra postage on it just in case. I was very surprised it arrived, and it’s given me the idea of mailing an even bigger – as big as an A4 page! – Japanese lenticular card that I bought years ago.

As for the six that haven’t arrived, I don’t remember what they depicted or what I wrote on them. I number my cards so I can extrapolate when and where I sent them (Nagoya and Tokyo) but can’t speculate why they never arrived when others mailed the same day in the same mailbox did.

And as for the stamps, here are all the unique ones on the cards I mailed us:

Some good stamps here, but I discovered something interesting at the very tail end of the trip so I think the stamps I send from Japan next time will be a lot more interesting…

All these cards are now put into the big binder titled ‘Japan’, which is so full I think I need to start another. And if you’re wondering, yes I left space for the missing six 🙂

Robot Claw