Written in 2000, last updated March 2007
One of the reasons anime becomes such an encompassing interest for many fans is the wide range of related hobbies and interests for anyone. There are hobbies for those who like writing, those who like reading, those who like language studies, drawing, or collecting. Since I have a tin voice, little time, and more money than sense, I chose collecting as my hobby.
I started with a few cards in 1995, and since have moved into shitajiki (pencil boards). Starting to collect in these areas can be difficult because it's tough to find Japanese things here with any regularity, and cards can be expensive. Thanks to trading cards and shitajiki, I can now claim more sense than money, though both are in short supply. Even cheap ones add up quickly, and once you start to become obsessed with completing sets, you can find that some sets are extremely difficult to finish. At what point does an occasional purchase turn into a collection? Perhaps at the moment you do it again. Recurring, planned buying or trading patterns indicate that you've grown yourself a hobby. At that point, it never hurts to have a little help.
There's no way around the fact that anime collections of any kind are highly expensive, time consuming, and often very frustrating. It can be extremely difficult to complete a collection both for reasons of rarity of the items here in America and because of their expense here when you do find them. While it's easy to go into a card collecting habit thinking that you'll buy just a few packs and trade for what you need, finding people who have what you need to trade for can be difficult or impossible at times. And, while it's easier to trade for common or regular cards, it's a lot harder to find people who have the rare and special cards from sets to trade – especially if you don't have any to trade with them. Even trying to complete the regular/common set for some collections can be difficult when the set is rare, large, or poorly collated. Some of my correspondents laugh that what they've spent on the hobby could have bought them a new car – or a trip to Japan where they could have picked up many of these items at a much lower expense. Unfortunately, that's a painful joke because it's often true.
So why do people do it? Many people tell me that they love cards for the artwork – and it's true that many sets have art pieces that can't be found anywhere else, original items done for the set. Even sets of generally available artwork, while they can be expensive, can be much less expensive than trying to track down multiple art books for the series – you just have to be willing to take your art in small sizes. ^_^ One correspondent mentions that she loves to organize things, so putting all the cards in order is fun for that reason. Addiction does play a factor as well. There's something thrilling about getting that last card you need for a set, whether you trade for it or find it in a pack you've purchased. One of my correspondents says she is addicted to her mailbox – if she doesn't get a package every day she's disappointed. I can understand the feeling! There is a joking tendency among card collectors to call each other (and the card companies) evil: What seems cute and good and happy and beautiful can disguise a lurking demon set that will make you want to pull your eye teeth to pay for that last image of Hotohori or Chibi Usa (I reserve comment on Chibi Usa).
Many collectors tell how they've sworn not to branch out after they get just one set – and then started a slide down a slippery slope first to related series, then to other series that are cute, pretty, or feature favorite characters, artists and stories. Collections can be for one series such as Card Captor Sakura, collections of one artist's work such as Mutsumi Inomata or Masamune Shirow, or commemorative collections of artwork such as the Hana to Yume and Asuka collectors sets featuring artwork by these magazines' most popular artists. Collections can feature:
- manga art,
- video game art,
- anime art,
- original artwork in any medium from watercolor to CG,
- or any combination thereof.
Card collectors tend to be very friendly and to share images and lists of their collections with other collectors – knowing more collectors can make finding what you need much easier, and many people enjoy talking about and showing off their nice collections.
"Why do you collect?"
"In the beginning, it was an anime thing that was cheaper than anime itself. I now think that the anime would've been cheaper – I'm pretty sure that I've spent more on Sailor Moon cards than I would have for the whole series on LD. But once you've got *some* cards, you want to have *all* of the cards. To steal a line from a movie, all that there are!" -K. Hindall
"What's the best thing about collecting?"
"With a lot of artwork, you usually don't know anything about the people in it, you buy it because you like it. With anime, you know the characters and the boards, or cards, don't seem so distant/cold." -D. Baggish
People who collect cards often collect other types of stationery as well – collectors can branch out into shitajiki (pencil boards), cassette indexes, paper dolls, coloring books, notebooks, letter sets, stickers, stamps, pens and pencils, pencil cases, idol cards, postcards or file folders as well as dojinshi, manga, and CD's. Tattoos, seals, and even magnets can come in collector packets too. I'll have some notes on shitajiki and idol cards in later articles, but for now this series will focus on anime trading cards only – there's a lot to cover!
A few of the different ways cards are marketed:
Pull Packs
Pull packs are bundles of envelopes, each of which has a trading card inside. There is usually a prism special on the front of the pack, and two more hidden among the 32-40 envelopes in the bundle. It is most common for there to be 34 envelopes in the bundle. In Japan, these are placed by some cash registers like candy by ours – mothers or kids can buy just one envelope, and then pull a random envelope from the bundle. What they get is completely random this way. They may also find a tiny slip that says 'Atari' on it, which means they can pull another envelope for free.
In the US, pull packs are normally sold as a complete bundle as it would be too difficult for most sales sites to sell one or two cards at a time when the customers here are so spread out that sales involve shipping, and also because anyone splitting up a pack here is more likely to end up with leftovers that don't sell. Pull pack sets frequently have 36 commons (if it isn't clear, that refers to more common cards) and six rare special cards (usually prismatic, sometimes clear or other types) in the complete set, or may have 27 commons and 6 specials, so you have to get more than one bundle to even have a complete common set, and at least three packs for a complete rare/prism set. A few sets deviate from these numbers, such as the Bomberman trading collection that has 45 commons and six prisms.
The Pull Packs themselves often have a card list on the back that shows the number of various kinds of cards in the complete set so you know what you're getting into. Often they will say something like 33+3+1 on the pack bundle. I've seen people on ebay interpret this as 33 commons plus 3 prism cards plus one prism card on the front of the pack, but it seems they are incorrect. In the course of hundreds of PP packs, I have never found one with more than three prism cards total, including the one on the front of the pack. So I think the +1 probably refers to the one envelope design that comes in the pack.
Some sets have additional Special (SP) cards that are very rare – the Card Captor Sakura pull pack sets have about three SP cards for every ten card bundles – that is, three envelopes have an SP card in them out of 340, which is about twice the rarity of specials from box sets (however the cards as a whole are cheaper, making it balance out a little better). Most people do not have complete CCS pull pack sets because of SP rarity. Special and rare card types may include 'soft' prisms (sparkly cards which you can peel and use as stickers – a good way to give collectors heart damage), 'hard' prisms (which you can't peel), silver 'platina' cards, and metallic cards, as well as a wide range of interesting and unusual ideas we'll look further into later on.
There can be more than one Pull Pack set for a series – but each one released has a different cover, different envelope design, and different numbering, so as with the Card Captor Sakura TV series which has five different sets so far, you can tell which set you are purchasing either in the pull pack or when sold loose, because the later pp sets have higher card numbers and a different cover. Online vendors will normally list the set number in their sale description as well to help you keep track. Both the set name and the number matter - for instance, these five are the Card Captor Sakura Pull Packs 1-5, but there is also a Card Captor Sakura Trading Collection which comes in a separate Pull Pack release.
Complete pull packs commonly sell in Japan for around $5.00, but by the time they've been through sale, shipping to the U.S. and markup for sales here, they average $10-$12 from reputable dealers, $15 for the more rare packs. Some very rare sets are not offered for sale any more except through auction sites, and may go for $70 a pull pack, including the Fushigi Yuugi Pull Pack and the Magic Knight Rayearth PP2 set (which covers art from the second Rayearth series).
Sometimes pull packs can duplicate a set released in box pack form, although it's unusual. One set of this kind is the Rayearth PP1 set – the same exact commons, numbered 7-42, were also released in box packs as the Hero Collection, but the specials for the two sets are very different. The Bomberman Trading Collection has both a pull pack form and box packs, but the regulars and specials are exactly the same – the only difference in the sets is that there are sticker card checklists included in the box packs which aren't included in the pull packs. The Card Captor Sakura Trading Collection pull pack mentioned above was also released in box form - and while the pull pack cards have striated foil specials, the box ones have the same images and special numbers on smooth foil cards. These three collections are different from the norm in another associated way – normally pull pack cards are a little smaller and thinner than box set cards, and have rounded edges while box set cards normally are a perfect rectangle with pointed edges. Since these were released in matching forms in both types, all of the Rayearth PP1 and Hero Collection cards are the more lightweight, smaller PP type cards, while all of the Bomberman and Card Captor Sakura Trading Collections cards are the heavier stock box type cards.
Pull packs don't always hold cards – I've seen several Sailor Moon pull packs that have tattoos, stickers or rub-ons, several Marmalade Boy sticker sets released this way, six bookmark seal collections (for Sailor Moon, Slam Dunk, YuYu Hakusho, Rayearth, St. Tail and Ghost Sweeper Mikami – there may be more I haven't seen), and I also have one set of 1" tall magnets from Yu Yu Hakusho and one from Sailor Moon that came in pp envelope bundles.
Box cards
That's a rather awkward way of referring to individual card packs that may be sold singly or by the box. Boxes include from 12 to 20 packs, with 15 being most common although 20 is becoming more so and in 2002 I noted the release of several series in boxes with only 7 packs each (as of 2007, this is a common practice with small vanity publishing, particularly for sets to do with love video games). Each pack sells for 360-700 yen in Japan, and can be marked up to $5-$10 here in the US. Price is affected by the card type – there are some sets which are all chromium or all plastic cards, which cost more in Japan and hence will cost more in the US. Packs may have anywhere from five to twelve cards in them as well – so make sure to look at how many cards there are in each pack so you know what you're really getting for your money whether you're buying a pack or a box. Boxes usually cost less than buying the same number of packs separately. Prices range from $55 to $120 depending on the card type, the vendor, and the rarity of the set. Manufacturers are usually kind enough to list the number of different types of cards in a complete set both on the packs and on the box itself. Very few sets do not have a list on either one or the other. Pull pack sets occasionally include some cards that have a 'card checklist' on the back of them, and box card sets normally have a good set of checklist cards that show all the cards which should be included in a complete set of commons, uncommons, rares and specials.
Cards are typically inserted randomly in packs, and most commonly there are three SP cards per box, though I have seen variations on this, such as only two SP cards in each box in the extremely poorly collated Slayers Try Trading Collection set, or five in one of the HaruToki sets. Collation can make a real difference in how easy a set is to complete. The Corrector Yui set, for instance, is well collated, with common cards in given packs often in order, and each pack likely to have the next cards from the one before it. Most of my Slayers sets, on the other hand, are destined to give me gray hair with random missing commons that may be missing from three different boxes I go through, while I get fourteen duplicates of another common. Duplicate Specials in one box also make it a lot harder to complete the set when you have to get a whole new box for three (or sometimes two) new specials out of 9 you need. I would not recommend starting your card collection with Slayers unless you don't mind incomplete sets.
There is a wide variation in the number of cards in a complete set for different trading card series. I have several sets with 45 commons and anywhere from 6 to 9 rares and 3 to 9 specials, a few with 72 commons and 9 specials in addition, a majority with 90 commons and 9 specials, and some with even more cards in the set. The Rayearth Tomy Premium Collection is a plastic card set. It has 117 common plastic cards, 18 silver-lined rares, 6 clear specials, 3 die-cut cards and 5 'dareda' lenticular cards that show in-betweener images, one of which is a holographic card of Hikaru, as well as two SSP (Super Special) cards that come one to every three boxes or so. Sound like a behomoth? My Narumi Kakinouchi set has 218 or so cards, including 18 rares, plus 9 SP cards – and packs are extremely difficult to find! To top it off, there is one unnumbered ultra-rare card for this set which can be found one to every four boxes or so and is not on the card list for the set. They pulled the same trick on the Vampire Princess Miyu chromium set, which thankfully is at least smaller than the Narumi Kakinouchi set – but I still need that ultra-rare card.
Like pull pack sets, box sets may include commons/regulars, rares, and specials. Sometimes there's another layer in the form of 'uncommon' cards which of course are more rare than commons and less so than rares, and sometimes there are various kinds of ultra-rare or super-special cards (as in the Rayearth Tomy Premium Trading Collection mentioned above). Because of their square edges, box sets are more likely to include puzzle cards among their common cards, which you can put together to make nifty (or so one hopes) larger images. If you're very picky about where your edges line up, you might end up needing more cards to complete those sets to your satisfaction, as sometimes puzzle cards have better or worse alignment and you might compare multiples of the same card number to find the best one to keep.
Specials for box sets may include platinas, hard prisms of various types (such as prismatic, cross-hatch prismatic, or 'confetti sparkle'), metallic cards, and more unusual cards such as clear cards, embossed cards, die-cut cards, holographic cards, lenticular cards, and 'cel' cards, which have a three dimensional effect like a painted cel in a clear sheet overlaying the background. Special cards can be a major reason why people always want to get more card packs. While some people are content to collect only the common cards for a series, many people are very addicted to finding another shiny thing. It's the card collectors' "Magpie instinct."
Box sets often have 'insert' slips as well, which may advertise another set or may be 'lottery' cards where most cards say 'too bad, try again.' In this case, a few will say 'Atari' and you can send them in with money and answers to questions to get a super-rare card from the set. Some sets have instructions like this that let you send in for 'premiums,' whether they be binders, toy sets, or other odd freebies, if you collect enough insert slips and send money with them. Unfortunately, the instructions and questions for either type are in Japanese, require payment in Yen, and the companies will only mail items back to an address in Japan. Most also have offer expiration dates, and frequently these card sets haven't made it over to the US until well past that date. Sadness and woe! *sniff* So, many US card collectors do not have any of the premium cards or freebies for different sets. Sometimes the insert slips will have different line-drawing images on them, so many people collect these as part of the complete card set as well.
Vending Cards
In Japan there are a huge number of different vending machines. People have noted with surprise machines that sell anything from hot alcohol to girl's underwear. Some of the machines sell little bundles of trading cards. The bundles are randomly assorted, and often have packets of cards the size and weight (and with the rounded corners) of standard PP cards. I've also seen some half-size 'twin' cards from Banpresto, with stickers on the top, including 24 commons and 24 prisms (hidden under the stickers). Most frequently, complete sets will include 18 commons and 3 prism cards, but occasionally may have 32 commons and 6 prisms, or other count variations. Cards of this type that I know of include Card Captor Sakura (at least three different vending sets), Yu Yu Hakusho, Sailor Moon, Dragonball, Pokemon, Legend of Zelda and Marmalade Boy. I'm sure there are more I haven't heard of yet. These are often harder to find in the US than Pull Packs or Box Cards; the only place I've seen them for sale are on personal trading pages or on auction sites, sometimes in sets and sometimes in mini boxes that vendors in Japan use to restock their machines.
Single-Pack sets
This is a new phenomenon (or perhaps a revival of a phenomenon so old I haven't seen it before), in which a complete 9-card set is released in single packs which include all nine cards. Cards may be prism or plain, but are unique to these sets. Often these are done for special events like comic markets and fairs. Some examples include two Mamotte Syugogetten sets, two Love Hina sets, Di Gi Charat sets, a couple of Kanon sets, two Rurouni Kenshin sets, a Saint Seiya set, a Vampire Princess Miyu set, and a Samurai Troopers set of this type, all released in 2000 or later. Anisa told me of one single-pack set for Shonen Jump with 20+ reg cards, and two holo foils that make up a puzzle image. The more common type recently has 5-10 cards in a pack. I'm sure more will keep popping up! (Update from 2007 - at this point I have about fifty of these individual packet sets, and I'm sure there are many I have not seen yet.)
Promo Cards
Promotional cards are put out all over the place for some sets, while they're not even released for others. And it can be well-nigh impossible to complete a promo cards set. Many sets have one promo card that comes with the box. Trigun is this way, as is KareKano – each had one promo card only, which you got if you bought a full box. Ah My Goddess Perfect Collection, Bubblegum Crisis 2040 and Spriggan, alternately, had several different promo cards which might come with different boxes. Since only one or two types of promo cards come with a case, and US importers buy by the case, you'll often find in this sort of circumstance that everyone in America has the same promo cards and is missing the others. For Bubblegum Crisis, anyone who has one either has promo 1 or promo 4. For Ah My Goddess, everyone has promo 5. So we only know about the other promo cards based on what we have – there are at least four other AMG promos I know I don't have.
But promo cards aren't only released with boxes. I have three AMG promos I got with binders, three Di Gi Charat cards I got with binders, two Di Gi Charat cards that were released as promotions for movie specials, three Record of Lodoss Wars cards I got with a video game and four I got with four different film books. And I'm still missing several Lodoss Wars promos where I don't even know what they came with, so I don't have a way to search. By far the worst in this category are Pokemon (more so in Japan, but also to some degree in the U.S.) and the Aquarian Age CCG. While Pokemon has dozens if not hundreds of promo cards out that came in everything from cereal boxes to ANA airline giveaways, Aquarian Age is doing its best to zoom past those numbers. There are already 9 AA promo cards that came in different issues of AX animation magazine, a bunch that came in Dragon Jr. magazine, a bunch from PlayStation magazine, and different ones from almost every play manual, special deck, art book, or other 'supporter's accessory' I've found, and recently they've been putting them out in things like the Galaxy Angel DVD. There were over 200 only two years after Aquarian Age was released.
How do you know if there is a promo card for any given series? Only by happening to run across mention of one on a web page or email somewhere or finding one unexpectedly in any given item you buy. Sometimes you know there is a promo card because you have number PR5, so PR1-4 have got to be out there somewhere, or you have a mailaway insert from a pack. It's not one of those things we have down to a science.
Bromides
Bromides are overside trading cards (if you turn a standard one on its side, and stack two tall, that's about their normal size). Bromides can come either in the box packs (Inu Yasha, Gals) or in Pull Packs (Mahoujin Guru Guru). There is no difference in the method of delivery from how smaller cards are sold, just that they're a little larger.
Twins
Twins are a cute half size trading card that's put out by Banpresto as a vending cards. They have stickers over the top of the card and are normally in sets of 48 with the first 24 as commons and the second 24 as prisms, and stickers over all of them that you can peel and use which duplicate the images on the various cards themselves. There may be three different stickers on three different card number 7's (or 18's, or any other number) so that it can take some real organization to get both a full run of cards 1-24 or 1-48 and a full set of all the different stickers. One complete set may not match another complete set since the sticker types on any two given cards may be reversed.
There are also 'mini' cards for Sailor Moon and some other series, made by different manufacturers, which are about the same size as Twins but don't necessarily have stickers. Again, it's a difference in what's in the package, not how it's delivered, from the standard types listed above.
Idol Cards
Idol cards are also called Lami cards, because they're durable laminated images. Idol cards can be traded like regular cards, but they are usually released in very small numbers (that is, four or five images at a time in most cases for each series) rather than the sets of 21+ like trading cards. Sometimes only one will be released for a series, and sometimes you may get a run of 14 at once for a popular series like Rurouni Kenshin or Card Captor Sakura. They are sold individually rather than in packages, and cost about 100 yen in Japan, from $1.75 to $2.25 for a current issue here in the US, while older out-of-print ones are more expensive. There are special numbering codes to help identify which card you have in a series, and I'll get into those in a later article focusing on Idol cards alone.
Phone Cards
Another topic for discussion all on its own! Phone cards are collectable cards with images on them which also have magnetic strips so they can be used for credit on pay phones. The idea is catching on in the states (you can buy ones with bland images in most post offices and grocery stores), but in Japan there are many phones that only have credit strips and not change slots. So necessity means a lot of phone cards, and collectible culture means that the vast variety of different images available covers popular culture, the arts, famous persons, nature and many more types of images. Among them is a range of phone cards with anime images. They can cost quite a bit new; I've seen them from $20-$50, as when they are issued they cost a little for the card and a lot for the credit on it. Used ones tend to be more moderate at $5-$15 depending on the image.
As you can see, there are many different basic types of cards! And one series might have no trading card sets for it, while another has a dozen. I haven't seen a set yet for FLCL, but Card Captor Sakura has five PP sets, two Movie PP sets, five Cardass Masters sets, the Clow Card Chapter manga image set, the Sakura Chapter manga set, the Trading Collection, Etching sets I and II, dozens of Idol cards, Sakura L-Card collection (more like clear shitajiki), Trading Seals I and II, Vending sets 1-3, an Italian trading sticker set, trading card sleeves released with etched cards, and a North American CardCaptors set by Upper Deck as well as a recent issue of phone card replicas. Twenty-six sets I can think of off the top of my head plus idol cards – and possibly more on the way! Still, that's dwarfed by the Sailor Moon sets or DragonBall (which has 28 or more PP sets alone), with Yu Yu Hakusho, Marmalade Boy and Rurouni Kenshin that I know of trailing behind in the 10-20 range. A few of my correspondents bemoan just how many sets there are – every time we swear to cut down on cards, another gorgeous set comes out. This year I was shanghaied by two Ah My Goddess sets, X OAV and Manga sets, Yami no Matsuei, Inu Yasha, and the Aquarian Age Juvenile Orion sets, and more are always on the way!
Thanks go to K Hindall, D Baggish, Jijicat, Cat Cooter, Clavis-no-Miko, Petit Charat and Amanda for input on this article, and to everyone at animecards@yahoogroups.com for their support and sharing information with other traders!
Woot to the folks at animecards.org who are doing their best to scan every card ever created on God's green earth! Hwei!
Still Coming in the series –
What card sets exist?
What's the best way to get started collecting cards?
How do I get into this without losing my socks (or at least not as many socks as I might without preparation)?
Where do I find cards in North America?
Where and how can I trade cards?
How do I know these cards are real?
How much is a card worth?
The last part includes some small information and some good links on:
Idol cards – how to identify and collect them
Shitajiki – how to identify and collect them
…I'll add Phone card and Cel collecting only if I can convince someone else to contribute their expertise. ^_^