Trading Cards « Robot Claw

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Let’s Trade Cards (Part 1)!

Monday, May 10th, 2021

KLS bought me a ‘mystery’ variety pack of trading cards for my birthday. It was a plastic bag with about 30 different packs of cards from 10+ years ago. Starting now – and in no particular order – I’m going to showcase every pack, with a bit of info about each set.

These Hunchback of Notre Dame cards (1996) are obviously based on the Disney film. It’s a weird set since each pack includes only one or two traditional cards with the rest being standees, jigsaw puzzles, strange 3D model pieces etc. I reckon kids would have loved this, but I wonder if perhaps it failed since this approach – ‘activity’ cards – hardly caught on.

This Bill & Ted’s series (1991) is based on the first two films and is a mostly bare-bones set showcasing movie photos but with no chase cards. Alas, I didn’t win the bodacious trip to San Dimas 🙂

As a result of opening this pack I bought the set of both Bill & Ted films for a mere $3.74 at Walmart the other day. I bet they’ll be non-heinous!

Hyborean Gates (1995) is a legendarily bad TCG that was maligned in early reviews and delayed upon release so when it finally hit stores no one bought it. It’s spectacularly badly designed, and the base set includes cards that cannot even be played since they require cards that were to be included in an expansion that ultimately was never released. Furthermore all the art is by Boris Vallejo or Julie Bell, so if their airbrushed style isn’t to your liking the cards aren’t even appealing for their art.

I bought a couple of boxes of this series a few years ago for $1 each, so this single pack would be worth maybe $0.04. In other words, these cards are just garbage!

Just who was the target audience for a Blondie card series in 1995? The newspaper strip was ancient even when I was a stripling, so this is a good example of the rampant overproduction in the card industry in the 1990s. The cards themselves are poorly designed, with strips reproduced over multiple cards so you’d have to buy many packs to even read a tiny comic! Interestingly 1 in 72 packs contained only chase cards, which was pioneering then and very rare even today! Still, this set probably didn’t need to exist.

I’ve never seen Hook so all I’ll know about the movie I’ll get from these cards. They’re certainly nice enough, and follow in the design footprints of the famous Topps sets from the ’80s. Plus the stickers are (always) cool! The cellophane packs are extremely unusual, and probably one reason why the set has no chase cards.

I actually have an entire unopened box of these cards. If you leave a comment on this post I’ll send you a sticker 🙂

I’m less than a quarter through this big pile of trading card packs, but could there be any set weirder than Iditarod (1992)? Before opening it I thought it may be nice photos of dogs and snowy vistas, but it’s almost entirely photos of (human) entrants with ridiculous statistics on the back. Who was this aimed at?

As I said there’s many packs left to go. What’s coming next? Wait and see…

Posted in Collecting, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Two Card Packs

Saturday, February 27th, 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 🙂

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, History, Otaku, Trading Cards | 1 Comment »

Hot Button Baseball

Sunday, November 8th, 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 🙂

Posted in Toys, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Trash in the Attic

Sunday, October 18th, 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 🙂

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

More Of This Old Nonsense

Saturday, April 11th, 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 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Otaku, Retro, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

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