Category: Trading Cards

Video City

July 12, 2016

In 1983 Topps released a set of trading cards based on popular video games of the era. Here’s an advert:

As it turns out, two of the games mentioned in the marketing – Centipede and Q-Bert – were not even in the final set, called Video City. Here’s the single unopened pack I recently purchased for about $8:

It was in remarkably good condition considering the age, and the wax seal was also unbroken. When I opened it, I was pleased to see the stick of gum hadn’t adhered to any of the cards. Wherever they’d been, they were stored well!

Each pack contains 3 scratch-off game cards like these:

The instructions are on the back:

The packs also contain three sheets of stickers:

The game cards are lacklustre, but I’m very impressed with how vibrant the stickers are. They’d look great on postcards…

There were several video game themed trading card sets in the early 80s, including Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dragons Lair (!) and Zelda. Although released by a few different companies they mostly all followed the same format of stickers and game cards. I’ve been trying to get a pack of some of these sets (especially Dragon’s Lair) a while with no luck. If you ever see one, keep me in mind 🙂

‘Blessed vs Cursed’ Review

March 26, 2016

It’s time for another MTG duel deck review.

The release of this one surprised me, as did the inclusion of preview cards from the next expansion (Shadows Over Innistrad). The decks match ‘blessed’ humans against ‘cursed’ zombies and turned out to be great fun to play against each other.

The blessed deck is white/blue and heavy on creatures with ‘enter the battlefield’ triggers. Some are tailor made to kill zombies, and overall the deck plays quite quickly.

The cursed deck is blue/black, full of graveyard effects (self-mill, playable from, graveyard triggers) and is even faster than the white deck.

I played eight games in total and the final tally was a draw at 4 wins each! Almost every game was quick and few were easy wins. These are two of the best matched – and most fun to play – duel decks ever.

The pros will talk about the value of the cards as well, including an alternate art Geist (from the original Innistrad) as well as some notable rates. But what I found most charming was that while each deck contains Islands, the card art is unique to the decks they are in, so there are three pairs of the same islands in both cursed and blessed forms:

It’s a nice touch, and another plus in this overall great pair of decks. Highly recommended.

Dune Cards

November 19, 2015

You may recall I purchased the above last month at comic con. A full box of 36 unopened Dune cards from 1984. I never even knew the set existed, and the guy who sold it to me said he had a case of it!

I managed to complete the 132 card set in 25 packs, although with a bit of luck it could have happened in about 18. That’s very good collation, and there may even be two sets in the box.

The cards themselves are no nonsense, with a good quality picture on the front and lots of words – like the film itself – on the back. I reckon I wouldn’t have loved them as a kid though: not enough hardware or monsters.

The stickers though are amazing, and there is an incredible 44 of them! You won’t be completing this set in one box. However the passage of 31 years has had a distressing effect on the stick of gum, bonding it to the sticker on a molecular level. It’s essentially impossible to remove without damaging the sticker 🙁

Look at the lovely backs of the stickers, like tokens from some tabletop Dune RPG:

Lovely stuff.

Some of you will no doubt be mystified by my love of opening trading cards like these, but this Dune set checked all the boxes. I don’t even remember what I paid for it, but I’m glad I did 🙂

Robot Claw