Sunday, June 13, 2010

NCS: FINALLY found that Doctor Who Pack!



I found that Doctor Who card pack during a quick excavation of my room yesterday. No, I do not consider cleaning my room 'cleaning;' 'excavation' is a far more accurate term regarding the amount of work entailed and the end results. In this case, the end result was a super-shiny Donna Noble card (which I THINK is a 'super-foil emboss' card found in 1/4 packs). No, I will not share her; she is one of my favorite characters from the series AND is a shiny card. ;)

Word to the wise: Be wary of trading card companies making trading card games. Yes, it's cool that one can get cards printed that way, but I have seen some TC companies (namely UDE) doing some very scary things with their TCG properties, such as creating their own fakes and deliberately misprinting cards to increase their value.

See ya!

Monday, June 7, 2010

6/7/10 NCS + Konami did something right.



Decent pulls this time, too...and awesome sleeves are awesome! Seriously, Konami, PROPS on finally making these! They have been in Japan since "Tactical Evolution," so it's good to see them finally bringing the tradition over. There are also Majestic/Savior Star Dragon sleeves out somewhere for you 5D's fans. Cool.

Before you ask...Ai-sama ordered me to buy those sleeves. Yep.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

I Surrender.

No, I'm not quitting this blog in favor of my creature one. I still have plenty of card game love left in me, as my eBay watch list will attest. Speaking of, I need to ask WTF happened with my Digimon card game decks...

But I digress. I have bitched long enough about how Pokemon has been mooching Digimon's designs since Gen III (as well as, perhaps, YGO's since Gen II), about how Bakugan mooches from everybody, and so on. Corporations mooch off of each other all the time, no matter how shamelessly.

I surrender. I'm going to stop complaining about that. Digimon, though cool, is all but dead. What made it better than Pokemon originally has been all but lost; the new Digimon seem almost like Transformers or Megazords. Pokemon has won by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Deal with it. (Plus, Bandai fails hard at marketing.)

Similarly, I actually like how Bakugan mooches, sometimes. For example, Skyress looks an awful lot like Magic Knight Rayearth's Windam. The two are similar down to the color. No other monster series had ever tried to base something off of a monster from a shoujo manga (and a rather famous one at that!) that had been made YEARS before. This could grant CLAMP some extra revenue should people dig deep enough. That's not a bad thing.

There will, however, still be times when I bitch at copying...especially when it's done poorly. YGO, although based off of Magic:the Gathering itself, is EXTREMELY prone to being copied. Duel Masters is the most notorious copy of BOTH games, no matter how unique people claim that it is. That I will pick up on like no tomorrow.

No more bitching about the designs. Franchises evolve. They are just using what works.