Alright, so I may just be crazy, but there is a certain art style used in the early years that I am super nostalgic towards and love greatly. The style, as best as I can describe, usually exists on the non effect monster cards and fusion cards. Usually this style has one creature and contains no other creatures, people, or even background pieces. The background is typically 1 or 2 colors with some sort of pattern. The monster itself also has a unique style that is hard to pinpoint, but the monster is not as detailed as some of the effect cards, spells, traps, etc.
There is definitely a difference. The top selection are almost like Sugimori with a monster plopped on top of a plainish background. But they also have a more basic vibe in a way that is difficult to pinpoint.
Unfortunately the artists are not credited in Yugioh cards but I would hazard a guess that those drawing the very early stuff haven’t been involved for some time.
This is my current binder progress for Japanese Vol.1 - 7 sets + some promos and misc stuff. Yellow sleeves are temporary dividers between the sets (I do plan to sort the layout once I’ve cleared some non-set crap from the back and freed up some slack). I apologise up-front for the crappy pictures but photography isn’t my forte and I’m relying on a rubbish phone and equally rubbish artificial lighting.
@thsigma I think you’ll find plenty of the sort of art you like in these pages.
Another reason I enjoy collecting these is because the OCG is chock full of card art that was censored or altered completely for the west. I’m fully against censored artwork so collecting the cards as they were meant to be is what I like doing. As a rule, it seems Konami will censor out most things sexual, religious, or depicting guns i.e. Barrel Dragon in the TCG has its revolver-like guns changed to futuristic laser guns (which I do think look cool in this one instance to be fair).
There are cards like Final Flame which has a weird goblin thing in a fire for the TCG but the original is literally a priest-like guy getting burnt alive at a stake:
Then there are cards like this which are just straight up naked in the OCG (with a bit of missing anatomy LOL). Honestly, there are so many of these that I couldn’t begin to show them all. I’ll just say that the Konami art censor department love to just slap spandex over certain areas, use a paint bucket tool to fill in exposed skin, and perform “reductions”.
Ah, I didn’t know about one of the legs being a notorious poor grader! They were all pack pulled together Christmas of 2003, sleeved straightaway and went into my deck for years, so the conditions aren’t bad; I’d say they all probably range from PSA 8-10.
Good to know that it wouldn’t just be me annoyed by differing grades, so I’ll keep them as is!
I’ll have to go back through my little box and have a look what else is in there later.
To be fair, the leg situation may be different with yours being the LOB-E print as they would have been printed separately to the American cards. All I know is that one of the legs in NA print seems to have more centering issues than the other parts.
There is a Canadian dude on IG called “yugiohscrub” who does make cases/frames like that for individual cards. Haven’t seen one for the Exodia set but he does take requests/commissions via DM. No idea on pricing though.
I started collecting Pokémon cards at age 7 after seeing the cartoon on TV. I’ve never played the Pokémon TCG and also never tried to learn it. In fact, @pfm explained most of the rules to me while we were watching matches at Worlds 2022 in London.
MTG I never collected nor played, and none of my friends did either. I usually saw older kids play it at high school and college.
Nowadays I keep gifted MTG cards that come with Pokémon orders, but that’s about it.
As for Yu-Gi-Oh, me and my little brother were gifted a collection from a friend of my little brother. At the time I was 9 or 10 years old and could barely read English, so we made up rules ourselves (I guess that more closely resembled the cartoon games than the actual Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, haha ). When I was about 14 or 15 years old I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh online and my little brother quickly followed suit, and after that I’ve bought quite a few cards to make my favorite online decks irl (usually slightly adjusted with only affordable cards), even though I only had my little brother to play against irl. After a few years I had like 10-15 different decks. Some I remember out of the top of my head: Zombies Xyz; Naturia Syncho Lock; Crystal Beasts; Final Countdown; D.D. Inferno Golem; Reptile; Spell Counter; Batterman; WATER.
I never played competitive, only with my little brother for fun, until he stopped collecting/playing.
I also remember doubting about buying a Secret Rare Black Rose Dragon for 35 USD for about 2.5 weeks, before I finally bought it. Oh, how times have changed.
I used to buy Yu-Gi-Oh cards from gametimecc.com for years. But after a while there were more and more cards on my wanted list that were never in stock, so I started looking for an alternative and came across TrollAndToad.com. Unlike GameTimeCC, which is primarily focused on Yu-Gi-Oh, TnT also had a lot of Pokémon stuff, so I also bought a cheap Venusaur and Hitmonlee with one of my many Yu-GI-Oh orders (the only two gen 1 Pokémon cards I didn’t have as a kid).
And eventually I placed all cheap Pikachu in my TnT basket on impulse back in 2015, which was basically the start of my Pikachu collection. Soon after I only collected Pokémon cards and quit collecting and playing Yu-Gi-Oh, until some of my Pokémon goals were complete or almost complete and I decided to collect one of each Yu-Gi-Oh rarity, including all variations, OCG/Korean, and misprints, for which I’ve actually written an article here on the forum:
I still add to this collection, but not actively. If I notice a new set contains a new rarity through a randomly suggested YT video, I buy a single in that rarity once prices drop a bit, but I haven’t searched for any of the misprinted rarities I’m missing in a long while.
TL;DR: Pokémon TCG was for collecting; I’ve never played nor knew the rules. Yu-Gi-Oh TCG was for playing. (MTG TCG neither.)
For the TCG, the main different between MTG/Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon, is that the former were 100% focused on TCG players (they have started focusing more on collectors in the last 2-3 years though, but for the two decades prior barely), whereas Pokémon was focused on both collectors and players 50-50. I also feel like the Pokémon cartoon/anime is much more kids-friendly compared to Yu-GI-Oh. And even though I liked to watch both as a kid, I’ve watched every single Pokémon episode/movie (yes, over 1200 episodes and 25 movies…). Whereas for Yu-Gi-Oh, I’ve only watched season 0; the two seasons with Yugi; and the two movies with Yugi. Since I watch anime pretty regularly, I’ll probably continue watching the other Yu-Gi-Oh seasons eventually, but not sure when.
Yugioh did have some collectability due to its tie in to the tv show. To this day, most of my favorite and most nostalgic cards are ones that were used throughout the show. The entire Duelist Kingdom arc has some of the most iconic cards and characters. I was particularly fond of Yugioh GX as well and loved trying to get all the elemental heroes. MTG always felt like a players game and not something I’d ever want to collect, while Pokemon and Yugioh felt more natural in terms of collecting, with Pokemon being the most collector centric to my child brain at the time.
Here in the UK, I can honestly say that I only ever saw MTG on sale once when I was a kid. Even today, I only see it available online, never in a physical shop. Unless I’ve just been blind all these years, I don’t think MTG is really a “thing” here.
Saying that it’s also extremely rare that I see Yugioh. It’s only Pokemon.
Power of Chaos PC promos. Imo, the worst and most overly reprinted arts for all three of these characters but I completely forgive them for the beautiful prismatic foiling here and also because these were the first printings of these arts in English (they were also in Dark Beginning Vol.1 as ultras and supers but not 100% sure if that came before or after the PC promos). Each one came with a few other promos in separate Yugi, Kaiba, and Joey versions of the game. I have those cards in a binder.
Gemini Elf Ultimate Rare. Uncensored artwork and the best foiling in Yugioh imo. This isn’t a very dynamic art but I love how the small face markings are also foiled.
Chaos Emperor Dragon Ultimate Rare. Better than the TCG version from Duelist Pack Kaiba imo. I would love to get the ultimate rare Black Luster Soldier to match but that one is pretty expensive.
Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon in Ultimate Rare. One of my favourite cards of all so I had to get this Japanese ulti which just looks incredible. It is from ‘SDX’ which is some sort of deluxe structure deck set. Another SDX product was also released which comes with an ultimate rare Victory Dragon (which is in a binder somewhere with a worn corner unfortunately).
Fun fact. The reason why I learned “Ryu” meant “Dragon” in Japanese was directly tied to me collecting dragon yugioh cards and noticing a bunch had “ryu” in their names. XD
As a kid, I had already pretty much determined I would be collecting the TCG since I loved the show and creatures, but seeing someone’s Serpent Night Dragon made it my first chase (I had quickly already got a Red Eyes & Blue Eyes but for some reason almost no one I knew had a Serpent Night Dragon).
). When I was about 14 or 15 years old I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh online and my little brother quickly followed suit, and after that I’ve bought quite a few cards to make my favorite online decks irl (usually slightly adjusted with only affordable cards), even though I only had my little brother to play against irl. After a few years I had like 10-15 different decks. Some I remember out of the top of my head: Zombies Xyz; Naturia Syncho Lock; Crystal Beasts; Final Countdown; D.D. Inferno Golem; Reptile; Spell Counter; Batterman; WATER.
