Category: Trading Cards

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 🙂

More Of This Old Nonsense

April 11, 2020

I bought these, one of the last ‘nonessential’ amazon purchases I made:

Two packs each of Duran Duran and Tron trading cards. Let’s open them, starting with Duran…

These were released by Topps back in 1985 as part of the marketing Blitz for the Arena album. At the time both KLS and myself (and Bernard, and most of the world) were big Duran fans but I can’t remember ever seeing these cards. Naturally having found packs on Amazon for the low, low price of $8 each (sixteen times their 1985 price) I had to buy some!

Each pack has 3 cards and 3 stickers (from a pool of 33 of each). Here’s what I got:

Can you believe it?!?!? The two packs were almost complete duplicates, differing only in one sticker slot!! Furthermore the card images are pretty poor and the stickers have lost their adhesive.

The card backs are dull too:

But at least the sticker backs form a puzzle so they’re useful even if you use the sticker:

And here’s a closeup if the 35-year-old bubble gum:

Don’t worry, I didn’t eat it 🙂

Overall this isn’t a great card set, but I reckon in 1985 I may have liked it especially for the stickers. While it’s disappointing I got mostly duplicates, at least it takes care of Bernard’s Christmas gift this year!

Let’s move on to Tron:

Released by Donruss way back in 1981, each pack has 8 cards, a sticker and – a weakness then but a strength today – no bubblegum! The pack design is great, but the cards themselves are even better:

The images are crisp and immaculately printed and the black borders look great. In my opinion these are some of the best trading cards ever made and a wonderful showcase for the film.

In fact I already had four packs of these but I’m always looking for more since they’re hard to find now at a reasonable price (these were the only two the seller had; I paid $6 each pack).

The backs don’t tell the film story, and instead create a fantastically massive puzzle of one of the film posters:

The sticker cards are unusual since they’re based on the Tron arcade game and contain tips on the back (which I’m sure no one ever used!):

Unfortunately after 40 years they too have lost their adhesive. You can peel them off but he’ll never stick again.

Apparently this set had limited distribution since the film was an unknown quantity. I’m reasonably sure these never made their way to Australia because if they did I would have bought as many as I saw (for 25c/pack!). A wonderful card set that I’d love to complete one day.

In case you’re wondering I’m always on the lookout for other vintage pop culture card packs. Topps made loads of sets I’ve never even seen a pack of – like Masters Of The Universe, Fright Flicks or Marvel Super Heroes (from ’76, which has Conan comic cards) – but I’d also love to get my hands on more vintage Star Trek or Alien or Indiana Jones cards. If you ever see such things for cheap, please keep me in mind 🙂

Robot Claw