Who am I?

I'm Alan! I've been a fan of trading card games ever since I got into the Pokemon TCG craze in middle school, and over the years, I've built up quite a collection of old games.

I am, however, a very casual player. That means I'm typically not interested in building custom decks for games, much less learning and analyzing different strategies about a game or attempting to play it competitively. I'd much rather take a breadth-first look at multiple card games across genres (and over the years) than dive deeply into a single one.

That said, I do have some favorites. .hack//ENEMY and World of Warcraft are probably my favorite two to both play and collect. UFS/UniVersus and Star Trek 2E are also high on the list to play. I also have a soft spot for collecting ReZ, PanZ, Star Trek 1E, and Meta X.

In terms of non-defunct card games, I play (very casually, meaning "I buy theme decks") UniVersus and Pokemon. I also casually collect Magic, a game that I know how to play, but have intentionally never acquired any playable product for other than a starter deck from 8th Edition. (When I say "casually collect", I mean "buy singles from the Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings sets from TCG Player". I have never purchased any Magic booster packs, of any type.)

My wallet generally prefers that I avoid active games. Besides, I'm happier pulling out a bunch of older defunct games and hopping between them, anyway.

Where does the information on this site come from?

Not AI. (Google Gemini's summary is wrong 99% of the time for defunct card games, anyway.)

The vast, vast majority of info here comes from me owning, collecting, playing, and opening these games. I won't cover a game that I don't own at least one product for, and typically will own much more than the one product.

As such, where possible, I look at the physical product I'm holding in my hands to assemble (for example) information about what rarity of cards come in decks, whether decks are randomized or fixed (or some combination thereof), how many sets were released for a given game, what types of cards a game has, what products were available for a game, and what the contents of those products were. This information comes from physical rulebooks, boxes, and the contents of the boxes themselves.

However, in some cases, this isn't possible. There are games where I do not own enough product, or a broad enough slice of products. In those cases, I research in a few different ways:

For deck contents, if it's not a product I own (or a product I haven't opened enough of, to confirm whether deck contents are fixed or randomized), I'll watch YouTube unboxing videos for those products, (painstakingly) transcribe lists of cards from those videos, and compare them against the direct information I do have. I will also look up ebay listings for products to reference photos (of the backs of deck boxes or booster packs). Basically: I'll still reference physical product, just not physical product I can hold.

For information relating to rules or card types, I'll look up scanned versions of physical rulebooks (preferred) or find archive.org comprehensive rule sheets from official websites.

For information about the different sets a game has, I'll reference different card game and fan websites, and archive.org versions of the official websites. I'll cross-check that information as much as possible with card list websites (such as TCG Player or CCG Trader, since seeing images of cards in a set is a pretty good sign that the set exists).

Release (and game active) years are probably the information that is the most iffy. Again, I will attempt to reference multiple sources to find release dates for sets, but this usually has the least information going for it.

Games that have player-run continuing committees also typically have websites with good, authoritative information that I'll trust for things like rules, card types, sets, and release years.

Despite all of that, I know I can make mistakes. If I've gotten any information wrong for any part of a game's writeup, corrections are always welcome. You can contact me here.

Where else can I find info?

I release video versions of these writeups, as well as unboxing videos, on YouTube. I also have deck listings for products that I've opened on my Randomjunk website.