Category: Trading Cards

Two Card Packs

February 27, 2021

Amongst many other wonderful things, SMC sent me two old packs of trading cards for Christmas. I opened them today!

These Jaws cards have been on the blog before, but they’re great so let’s feature them again. Released in 1983 these were 3D cards where every pack came with a tiny pair of red/blue 3D ‘glasses’!

Interestingly the gum stick was packaged between cards, but amazingly it didn’t adhere to any of them and slid right out without causing any damage. It was of course inedible and had the consistency of hard plastic.

The cards themselves have a remarkable good level of 3D when viewed through the glasses, and I imagine were a genuine treat for kids when they bought them back then. We all know the film is trash, but since Topps chose to use illustrations rather than movie stills they could have applied this 3D method to any other card set. 3D Star Wars cards in 1983 would have blown my mind!

The second pack she sent was quite special since I’d been looking for a pack of these for years. It’s another video game themed set from 1982, and as you can see is based on everyone’s favorite Puck Man!

The gum looked like this, and was absolutely caked in fine flour! This made the interior dusty, but at least meant it hadn’t stuck to a card. Obviously I didn’t eat it!

Each pack contains 3 sticker cards and three game cards. The above shows the front and back of a sticker card, and the art here is typical of the others: dreadful. But do they still stick? No they don’t, which is a shame since they would have been great on postcards 🙂

The scratch off cards are impressively designed, but no longer work. The scratchable material has concretized over the years and is irremovable without also removing the underlying card. No high score for me!

Back in 1982 I would have loved these. Scratch-offs were almost unknown in Australia in those days, and stickers are always fun. Did I ever see or buy a pack back then? I can’t recall.

Thanks Sue; these were great 🙂

Hot Button Baseball

November 8, 2020

I bought this a couple of weeks ago:

It’s a product from 2005 and yes, I paid $7.99. I found it in the budget bin of a weird store that sold toys and sports memorabilia. It caught my eye because it seemed to have a Barcode Battler vibe, and for that reason alone I needed to know more. Here’s the back of the package:

And here is the device itself unpacked:

Lots of buttons and what I originally thought were sensors lined up down the sides! It’s fairly compact and had promise. But how did it interact with the cards?

Speaking of which the cards themselves are plastic and transparent, with an amazing amount of littles codes lined up on each side. The backs have stats on the players, so (I suppose) they would be of interest to sports cards collectors as well?

The game is played by making teams with a limited amount of cards (the rules for making teams ate simultaneously restrictive and vague), then slotting the cards into the device like I have here. Then you…. well you just push the red button and watch lights flash randomly.

Randomly choosing a light is all this thing actually does! There’s no score keeping, no bar code reading, no calculations or anything. You push the red button, a light randomly lights, and then you decide what that means in the context of the baseball game yourself. In the example above ‘Go’ was lit, which means something different from if anything else was lit.

All the other buttons? They toggle things on and off on the screen for scoring purposes. It would be easier and faster to just use a piece of paper!

So this thing is just a random number generator linked to a bank of LEDs. A curiosity perhaps, but hardly a compelling game.

I packed it away into a box, never to be seen again 🙂

Trash in the Attic

October 18, 2020

Prices for collectibles of all sorts have skyrocketed during Covid. There’s many theories for why and I’ll not speculate here, but I’ll say it’s made me look at my game collection in a new light.

But the other week I read an article about how old Pokémon cards in particular have seen insane price rises. To explain: Pokémon started (and continues) as a game series, but about 20 years ago become a collectible card game as well. When it did we bought some cards but never really played them, and our cards had languished in a box ever since.

Prompted by the article I got them out for a stickybeak…

In addition to several hundred loose cards I even had some sealed product. These would have collectively sold for quite a bit had I kept the packaging, but as is were worth very little.

But within my loose cards I found a few gems:

Some of above are promos and I no longer remember where I got them. One was a game pack-in card and one (the top right) was pulled from a pack I bought at Target on a whim about 17 years ago. These four shown were worth about $150.

This was my true gem. Note the ‘1st edition’ symbol on the left side: that increased the value significantly. If I had paid to have this professionally graded and sold it myself on eBay I may have got $500+ for it.

But I didn’t do that. In fact I sold the cards to an online store since I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of selling them myself. Aside from the work of sorting it all it was fairly easy just packing them up and waiting for the cheque to come.

And yesterday it did, for $389.92! Not bad for cards I didn’t have any attachment to that were sitting in a box in a closet!

All told I sold them about 75 cards, and about $350 of the value was in the five shown above. The remainder of my cards – hundreds of them – were worthless (less than $0.003 per card) and I trashed them.

So if you have any mint condition 20+ year old Pokémon cards in your closet it’s time to check them; you may be sitting on a nice little payoff 🙂

Robot Claw