Trading Cards « Robot Claw

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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

Two Treasures

Thursday, August 22nd, 2019

I picked up a bunch of weird stuff during my California trip. Here I’ll show two of them.

This LCD Star Wars pinball game cost me $15 which wasn’t bad considering it was new. A glance on eBay tells me I wasn’t ripped off. The guy that sold it to me made mention of treating it carefully since the plastic packaging had become brittle but of course I was going to open it!

And here it is! Note the poor sticker affixed between the buttons, as if after they made it they realized they forgot to brand it! You’ll also see that the only Star Wars evidence in the actual game screen are the droids on the backplate…

The batteries had of course leaked (it’s 24 years old!) but not seriously and it was an easy clean. I popped two more in and:

It has flashing lights, a vibration function and very, very poor gameplay! Also the game itself has nothing to do etc Star Wars, and I imagine the others in this like (such as a Barbie game) play identically 🙂

A curiosity though, already in a box never to be played again!

Following on, I also bought this for $5 at an amazing antique store in Gilroy:

A European Panini sticker pack from 1983! Panini made gazillions of sticker sets for just about every sport and licensed brand you can imagine and sadly they barely distributed outside of Europe. So I never got any Dark Crystal or E.T. or Pope John Paul II stickers in my youth…

The ‘original’ art stickers in this set are strange and difficult to look at for long periods, but most of the stickers were from the cartoon;

I bought this in the hope of sending you all some He-Man nostalgia via future postcards but the adhesive is too weak after 35+ years and these will therefore remain as priceless additions to my collection 🙂

Oh and even though this post was just supposed to be two treasures… here’s some of the rest of my purchases:

Posted in Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech, Time, Toys, Trading Cards | 4 Comments »

In The Cards

Sunday, July 28th, 2019

As I mentioned in this post, I bought a bunch of packs of old trading cards at a recent convention. Today I opened them, and I’m here to share the joy…

These American Gladiators cards were released in 1991 and feature shots of the gladiators and the various events. The sticker isn’t great since it’s not die-cut, and after 28 years has adhered to the backing so isn’t usable anyway! Overall this seems to be a boring set. Rating 5/10

I bought a bunch of this set when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999 and probably have all these cards somewhere in a binder. The screengrabs on the cards are a little blurry and the stickers should have been die-cut but when it came out it was amazing due to the widescreen size. Rating 8/10

Series two of Space Shots was released in 1991, and is evidence that back in those days almost anything got a card set (series TWO?!?). The cards are well made but very boring, and it’s difficult to believe anyone ever bought more than one pack of these. Rating 3/10

Dinosaurs was a criminally awful sitcom featuring ‘dinosaur’ puppets. I hated every second I ever saw of it and surprise surprise I hate these cards as well. For starters they don’t even include any shots from the show (just puppet photos), the ‘jigsaw’ cards are garbage and why on earth are there trivia cards?!? Not worth the cardboard they’re printed on. Rating 0/10

Speaking of dinosaurs all I know about the 1994 The Flintstones film I learned from the cards in this pack. And boy does it look bad! The card set is the usual no-effort trash that so many films received (that’s the sticker card above) and as with many in this post I find it hard to believe people actually bought these packs. Rating 0/10

If you had told me the Barbie cards (from 1991) would be amongst the best I would have guffawed and called you a jackanape. Turns out though you’d have been correct! Lovely design and well written text make more a nicely done set. My pack had cards from 8 different years but the set is a massive 196 cards so I wonder what the other designs would be? Rating 8/10

That’s Zoffy helping me with this blog post. Her assistance was of course invaluable…

I’d never heard of Bingo, a dog film released in 1991. Critics hated it but based on amazon reviews it’s so-so for kids. That said I doubt even a sleuth as skilled as The Shaggy D.A. could explain why they made a card set. These cards are, of course, not good, not bad… just nothing. Rating 0/10

I bought all these card packs as a set, and of course took the bad with the good. The only comment I’ll make about these I Love Lucy cards from 2000 is that surely that must be a typo on that card name? Rating 0/10

The printing on the wax-pack of these Wizard of Oz cards from 2000 turned the cast into a nightmare freakshow! The cards are shockingly low quality for such a famous film, but will make good tinder when the fossil fuel runs out. Rating 0/10

At NYCC years back some guy offered to sell me a case of these Dick Tracy cards for a song. I declined, which was wise since even opening this single pack was excruciating. Bad cards from a worse film, and a travestic mockery of the Topps vintage design, these deserve to be encased in concrete and sunk in a harbour. Rating 0/10

And now we move into actual vintage Topps! This set – Back To The Future II from 1989 – follows the by then established formula: bold colours, dynamic movie shots, well-written backs. But the stickers were no longer die-cut and (controversy warning!) in this particular case the movie is boring. The gum had long since turned to hard plastic. Rating 5/10

These Saturday Night Fever cards from 1977 are tied for the oldest cards I got and it’s quaint to think of a time when a dancing film was so big they sold trading cards to kids! However I had to toss these in the trash since:

The gum was moldy! The mold had (visibly) spread to one other card and was inside the packaging. Maybe it was long-dead since it’d been 42 years, but I wasn’t taking the risk. Rating mold/10

E.T. was – and is – a creepy film. For each of the three times we rode the E.T. ride at Universal earlier this year we were slackjawed that it was the phenomenon it was. I can recall buying these cards back in 1982 as a child, and I wonder what I did with them? It’s a good set – every card in my pack features E.T. – but the real surprise to me was the sticker:

Sixteen tiny stickers on a single sheet!!!?! As a kid I must have loved these. Alas now after 37 years the adhesive has all but evaporated and they flaked off the backing. No E.T. stickers to look forward to on your California postcards then. Rating 7/10

I hardly have to say it: these Close Encounters of The Third Kind cards from 1977 are the best I got. Timeless classic Topps design, great picture selection and an amazing (die-cut!) sticker easily lifts these above the others. I’d love a whole box of these but alas they are pricey and very rare now and this is likely the only pack I’ll ever open. Also note the ‘Skywatchers Club’ had annual dues?!? I wonder how many years it lasted? Rating 10/10

There was one last pack that you may have seen in the photo in the original post, but I’m not opening that one now. Maybe I’ve got better plans for it…

Posted in Collecting, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Trading Cards | 1 Comment »

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