A fun and silly concept that many of us can relate to.
The goal of this thread is to post cards that are VERY scuffed (beat up) from your childhood. These cards can be bent, folded in half, cut in half, cut with fancy scissors, covered in boogers and bbq sauce, hole-punched…the world is yours! The only rule is that they are not Mint!
They may have little value on the open market, but the emotional value and the stories these cards tell are priceless. A snapshot into your youth if you will!
Fossil Magmar is one of my favorite arts from wotc and one of the many reasons why Arita is one of my favorite Pokemon artists. When I was going through my collection when reentering the hobby, I found this card and was weirdly nostalgic towards it. I’m not sure what’s actually on the card (and I’m not going to taste it to find out) but my guess is some kind of BBQ sauce or Ketchup… I’ve since dubbed it my “BBQ Sauce Magmar”.
Shroomish is one of my favorite Pokemon. I love its derpy expression and its evolution Breloom always ends up on my Emerald team. I like to think the ink spots are actually poison from Shroomish itself 
Gen 3 is the generation of the tcg I’m most nostalgic towards, and this card is one of my favorites.
I guess I wasn’t a huge fan of Haunter growing up 
The Gym sets took a while for me to like when I returned to collecting. I think my lack of game knowledge made me dislike the gym cards (similar to Trainer Gallery Cards today). Nowadays I love them! Having the trainer’s name really helps with learning the huge cast of characters Pokemon has and helps create a sense of card and set identity. If you like Ken Sugimori art, the gym sets are for you.
Like many others on e4, I also collected Yu-Gi-Oh cards. However, I actually played Yugioh with family and spent many many days coming up with overpowered decks. Sleeves were an afterthought and I often kept my deck secured with rubber bands! With Pokemon, I got joy out of opening up packs and trying to buy as many Lv. X tins as I could. I mostly sorted Pokemon cards by their designs and total HP. Holos, reverses, secret rares, etc were all terms I never learned of until retuning to the hobby later on. It didn’t matter whether a card was an uncommon or a rare. It was the art that was most important.
This particular trio used to sit unsleeved in my dresser for “safe keeping”. That was probably how they got bent in half…
Launcher Spider was one of my all time favorite Yugioh cards. I loved its high attack and defense and often tried using it in my decks. It being a giant spiked mechanical missile spider was eye candy.
The first couple years of Yugioh TCG were filled with non-effect monster cards (many of them terrible competitively) that would eventually be phased out in favor of effect monsters and other cool stuff. Something about the early arts really captured my eye. I remember googling Yugioh cards on my family computer to try and find other cards that resembled the art style of this death spider.
Hope you enjoyed.
