Category: Trading Cards

In The Cards

  • May 6, 2018

I found this at Walmart last week:

‘New low price!’ meant $10, and of course I bought it. Twenty packs for that price was a steal, or seemed that way before I knew what it contained…

Here’s the contents:

Interesting mix. 11 different sets, including 4 packs of collectible card game cards. Nothing newer than 10 years, one of set (Anastasia) 24 years old! I’m guessing these have been in a warehouse a long time…

So let’s examine these in detail:

The Power Rangers cards are based on the film and are pretty boring. The plus is that each pack has a foil card, but the minus is that those foils are awful. Each card also has a strange Amerocentric trivia question on the back like this:

Can you get it without decoding the answer?

The X-Men cards have awful art, from the early days of computer-aided colouring. The less said about these the better. But what’s this on the wrapper…?

Each pack has an entry form for a contest to win a baseball card (then) worth $451k! Wikipedia informs me this card was indeed won, sold shortly afterwards for $641k and is now valued at $2.8 million!

The Anastasia cards are pretty normal for an animated film. I got one chase card (cut into an unusual shape as you can see). I’m pretty sure I’ve got packs of these in other boxes like these in the past so I’m guessing they were overprinted and undersold!

The Panda cards are unremarkable, but I got this flashy monkey card that will make a great Xmas gift for Bernard. And I also got this badass tattoo:

Fear the Fur indeed!!

The game cards are mostly garbage – useless cards from unwanted expansions for forgotten games no one played. But I got a rare token (?) from The Simpsons and some crazy gold Power Rangers card so that was good?

I’ve not seen Igor or Despereaux and judging by the cards I don’t want to! They’re uniformly brown for starters, and both seem to have uninteresting and somewhat ugly design. At least I got another chase in my Igor pack – and a Despereaux sticker that will no doubt end up on a postcard 🙂

Which brings me finally to the Space Jam cards. Again I’ve never seen the film, and frankly have always thought it’s probably awful, but take a close look at that card, specifically the bottom right corner…

Yes that’s a scratch-off panel!

My card may be a Grand Prize winner! I may have won a trip to Hollywood! It’s a shame it expired 21.5 years ago… but I’m still interested if I won? Should I scratch it off?

So that’s that! Worth $10 do you think? Or were these better left in the warehouse?

We Boldly Went

  • March 4, 2018

Yesterday was my birthday, and despite the exhaustion I felt from opening an obscene amount of gifts we somehow managed to drag ourselves over to Dave and Busters to ‘play’ this:

I’d seen this a few weeks back when I was here with Y and J, but I hid my excitement from them because clearly this is a machine that only weirdos would be excited by.

It’s one of those sliding-floor token machines, where you drop ‘coins’ down a ramp in the hope of having them push other coins off the edge (the front of the above image) so you can win. In other machines of this type you can win the actual coins, but in this one you win tickets (for the redemption shop) and trading cards!!

As you can see it’s Star Trek themed, and there’s eight different card designs, with sixteen different cards in total because there are uncommon ‘limited edition’ versions of each. The machine periodically drops cards or plastic tokens down onto the playfield, and these can fall into the hopper and ultimately can be redeemed for tickets. The metal coins are recycled back into play automatically.

It’s a lot of fun. Dangerously entertaining perhaps. Aside from the lights and sounds (such as a phaser every time you drop a coin) there’s also a combo bonus, the thrill when a new card or coin falls onto the playfield and – best of all – the joy when something of note actually falls off the edge!

After an hour of play, here’s what I’d won:

The plastic tokens were worth 15 prize tickets each, and we had 68. The cards are worth points as well (100 or 200 for limited versions) but you have to turn them in so I didn’t redeem mine. With the 1020 total tickets we earned I bought this (for 1000) tickets:

And… it’s terrible! It barely turns at all and will likely be trashed quickly 🙂

So here’s some analysis. In total I sunk $45 into the machine, from which I got 1020 tickets which were redeemed for a $5 toy. But we also had an hour of fun, and (most importantly) I also left with these beauties:

6 of the 8 cards, 2 in limited edition versions. These are extremely nice, very high quality cards and I like them a lot. So much so I may return to get the other two (Chekhov and a Tribble)! The game is super fun, and I can’t deny I’d like to play it again.

Interestingly despite the cards all being original series characters, the machine is branded with characters from many different Star Trek series. Will they be cycling in new cards over time?

I also have a few doubles of some of the cards. To get one at random, leave a comment explaining why Enterprise was the best Trek series 🙂

Highway Robbery

  • May 10, 2017

On May The Fourth – aka “Star Wars day” – I purchased this:

Don’t let the size fool you. It’s a single pack of Star Wars trading cards. Not just any cards though, the premium ‘High-Tek’ series from late last year. Here’s the inside of the box:

Topps spares no expense on packaging do they? Here’s how big that single pack is:

Now here’s the evil truth: this single pack cost me $60. Sixty dollars. Sixty dollars! Also it was on sale (due to Star Wars day). It’s normally $75!!

So let’s look inside:

Eight cards. Eight. $60 for only eight trading cards. Admittedly they’re all plastic, but there’s only 8 of them, and they all look sameish, and all feature characters of dubious interest. 

I could go into lots of detail here about how the all-plastic nature of the set is actually a negative, or how these cards themselves aren’t even as good as the plastic chase cards in the Aus/UK Rogue One set (which was $1/pack!) but there’s really no need because they cost me $7.50 each and that’s highway robbery!

So why so expensive? It’s because each pack contains an autographed card. Here’s mine:

Yes dear readers, that’s the actual autograph of Jett “George is my dad” Lucas, legendary non-actor who played youngling Zett Jukassa in Episodes 1 and 2. I’m sure you remember his blink-and-you-miss-him character fondly.

Now instead of $60 for 8 cards, you could think of this as, say, $5 for 7 cards and $55 for this dudes autograph. Except the auto itself goes for about a tenner on eBay.

In short, this product is a total ripoff. Not worth it by any stretch for the cards themself, with an autograph of extremely questionable worth as my reward. I was taken for a ride by Topps 🙂

Am I bitter or regretful? Of course not! To be honest I didn’t expect much going in, so in that sense it lived down to my expectations. Plus the gambling factor can’t be denied: I could have found this:

Or an autograph by Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Daisy Ridley etc. Autographs by these main characters sell for $1000+ on eBay, and that’s the reason like a product such as this exists. It’s not even the most expensive SW trading card set!

So a total ripoff, which had a small chance of being amazing, but made a good blog post anyway 🙂