Robot Claw

Yesterday I went to Charlestown Square, and I discovered what was once a venerable shopping center has now become the abode of pirates. Bootleg Labubu, bootleg Sonny Angel, bootleg Crocs charms, bootleg anime figures, bootleg Pop Marts, bootleg retro game consoles and all many of other things are sold at stalls openly by outlaws to unsuspecting (I hope) shoppers.

In the interests of further investigation, I purchased this:

This is a set of Mario Bros TCG game cards, in a lovely tin no less. No such TCG exists, so whatever is in this tin is a false product, undoubtedly peddled to me by a malefactor. You’ll note that the lower left contains the ‘expansion’ name: Scarlet & Violet Paldean Fates. This is of course false as well, because all the outlaws that made this product have done is stolen the logo from a recent Pokémon TCG expansion:

The item was listed as costing $9.99, but a sign advertised that it was 50% off and only $4.99! Strange therefore that the price tag was under the shrinkwrap:

In other words, the sale was a lie as well. It’s also worth pointing out that the tin itself had some rust on it:

They probably manufacture this on their pirate ships at sea, and don’t have the knowhow or inclination to protect the product from the briny sea air.

Opening the tin we find a shrinkwrappef pack of cards. Immediately many questions are raised, but I’ll get to them in a moment.

The product contains five foil cards (shown above), and 40 normal cards:

The quality is very low, with flimsy almost-cardboard cards that don’t appear to be coated. I’ll give them that the print quality is decent and all cards are unique (somewhat), and that they do indeed depict Mario-related images. This is the cardback:

This is sold as a TCG: a trading card game. I am inclined to challenge the ‘T’ in this moniker: are there additional cards in this game that I could in theory trade someone for? There were four different tins, but surely they didn’t contain different cards?

As for the ‘game’ part of the description… I’ve played a lot of TCG’s and have a good grasp on the way such things work but this one is puzzling. Let’s consider an example card:

I’ve put pink boxes around the four areas that (I assume) are game elements: the number in a circle in top left, the two numbers in shapes in lower right, the face (Peach in this example) in a circle in lower left and the ‘Attak’ and ‘Energy’ values at the bottom.

Naturally the swashbucklers that produced this didn’t include any instructions, so it’s left to the buyer to work out how to play this game. There’s no resource cards, so the number in top left is a bit of mystery since one obvious explanation would be a casting cost. I’ll get back to that number in a moment.

The two values in shapes look like strength and defense stats (or, to use MTG parlance, ‘power’ and ‘toughness’). This is a likely and obvious explanation, since all successful TCGs have such a system. But if this is true, then what of the ‘Attak’ and ‘Energy’ values? Do these cards have two different sets of power and toughness?

Things get more mysterious when we examine the two versions of this Luigi card. The one at left is one of the foils, and as you can see all the values are different. It’s ‘casting cost’ is 1 compared to the normal 3, it’s ‘power’ and ‘Attak’ are both lower, but it’s ‘toughness’ and ‘Energy’ both higher. Does this make it a better card? Who knows?!?

And then comparing these five cards – all with different ‘casting costs’ – we see there doesn’t seem to be any logic in any of their stats. In every way, the card costing 3 in the middle is superior to the one costing 5 at the left, so the ‘casting cost’ is no correlation to the other values. Even the ‘power’ and ‘toughness’ values are unrelated to Attak and Energy.

Let me be clear: this is a game created by villians, no doubt intended to be played in a rum-stinking moon-lit ship’s hold by buccaneers with a deck in one hand, a cutlass in the other and a parrot squawking advice over their shoulder. I’ve no inclination to believe this is an actual game and all values aren’t just random, but I’m considering the possibility that it might be.

So if you’ve fallen victim to this criminal swindle: if by bad luck you purchased this product and want to actually play it, I suggest the following rules:

• Shuffle the cards and deal an equal amount to each player, using all the cards (if an even amount of players, leave one card out).
• Pick a player to start.
• The player who starts plays a card, stating which value the game will score (power, toughness, Attak or Energy).
• The player who played the card with the highest value for that statistic wins all the cards played that turn. They go into his ‘pirates booty’ pile.
• The player who played the lowest value leads the next turn.
• The game continues in this way until no player has any cards left.
• Once the game ends each players adds up the value of their ‘pirates booty’ by summing the ‘casting costs’ of all cards then won.
• The winner is the player with the highest booty.

As for the face in lower left (Mario or Peach), they can be safely ignored. And if you’re wondering if my rules are strangely familiar, then yes I’ve repurposed this bootleg product as Mario Top Trumps! Enjoy playing 🙂