A magazine with cards inside

The Beyblade Battle Card Collection was a DeAgostini partwork: a numbered series sold one issue at a time at newsstands and kiosks, not a boxed game from the toy aisle. Each issue paired a short magazine about the Metal Saga anime with a set of eight cards, and from the first issue the cards could also be bought on their own, without the magazine. Both the Russian announcement and the French collector sheets treat the eight-card pouch as a product in its own right.

the site’s French packs for both series print eight cards per pack on the front, with Gingka launching on the silver Series 1 foil and a group of five characters on the green Series 2 foil. Three packs were also sold together on a hanging blister, distributed in France by Jouéco of Toulouse, and a counter box held twenty-four packs; the box photographed here carries German pack text, a printed price of 1,99 euros per pack and a top panel in Russian. The cards are cardstock with a light laminate rather than rigid plastic, as two Russian buyers noted independently.

Autumn 2011, five countries

The French collector sheet for Series 1 gives September 2011 as its month of first publication. The wider launch reached the World Beyblade Organization on 18 October 2011, when a member posted the address of beybladecards.com together with the game’s two rules pages and described the release as Europe-only, starting in Germany, France, Russia, Portugal and Italy.

Series 1 runs to 160 cards: 33 Character, 79 Beyblade, 27 Customizer and 20 Effect, plus one standalone card at number 160 that belongs to none of the four types. Commons occupy numbers 1 to 117, Rares 118 to 141, Very Rares 142 to 151 and Ultra Rares 152 to 159.

January 2012, Series 2

Series 2 followed in France in January 2012 with 80 cards numbered 161 to 240. The blister’s printed text calls it an extension of Series 1, and the pack art moves from Gingka alone to a group of five. The breakdown is 20 Character, 35 Beyblade, 10 Customizer and 14 Effect, with a second standalone card at number 240; Rares sit at 216 to 230, Very Rares at 231 to 236 and Ultra Rares at 237 to 239. Two of the four Effect names carry over from Series 1, Mécanicienne (the Mechanic) and Esprit de puissance (Spirit of Power), and two are new, Arène (Arena) and Sortie d’arène (Arena Exit).

That is where the checklist ends. No third series appears in any database we have read, even though the packaging is marked as Series 1 and one Russian buyer took that label as a promise of more. Whether a Series 3 was ever planned is not yet sourced.

February 2012, Russia

Russia is the latest date we can pin down. The collection went on sale there on 9 February 2012, and the plan, as reposted by a reader from the publisher’s own description, was 52 issues at one every two weeks. The first three issues carried extras: a 56 by 56 centimetre play arena in the first, a box to keep the cards in with the second and a Beyblade wristband in the third. The magazine promised strategies, comics, tactics, profiles of top bladers, quizzes, puzzles and posters. A pack on its own cost 59 rubles, and one buyer reported at least one Rare or better in every pack, a single account we pass on as such. Whether the run reached its fifty-second issue is not known from anything we have read.

The codes that would not register

Every card carries a strip of characters along its bottom edge, hidden behind question marks on the rules pages, and the game’s website appears on the WBO post, the French sheets and the display box alike. The rules pages also link to two further pages, presumably on the same site although the images do not print the address: a deck-building guide named after the B-Pit shop from the show and a set of line-up tips presented as Madoka’s.

What a code unlocked is not recorded in any source we have read. What is recorded is that in Russia, in the days after launch, the codes did not go through: between 10 and 13 February 2012 several buyers on the LastSticker.ru thread reported that theirs could not be entered on the site. Whether that was a Russian rollout problem or a wider one is not known; no source from the other four countries in our corpus mentions the codes at all.

Two audiences, two verdicts

The WBO thread is the only contemporary reaction from the Beyblade hobby in our corpus, and it is short: eleven posts between 18 and 29 October 2011. Almost all of them dismissed the game on sight. The cards were called ugly and cheaply made, the idea of a card game about spinning tops was unwelcome, and a member’s own fan-made deck project was held up as the better design because it involved actual battling. One reply engaged more carefully, judging the game to be aimed younger and noting that Spain already sold a Beyblade magazine. It is a small sample from a community centred on the toy, not the cards.

The Russian collectors who bought it the following February read it very differently. Across some thirty comments on LastSticker.ru the tone is that of people pleased with a well-made product; one early buyer praised the feel and finish of the cards and listed the play arena, the character cards and the Beyblade cards among the things he liked. Their complaints were practical, duplicates and the codes. One buyer had 101 of the 160 cards after twenty packs; another was twelve cards short after forty.

How it is documented today

Three collector databases keep the checklist alive: Coleka in English, with all 240 cards across both series; LastSticker.ru in Russian, with the 160 cards of Series 1; and Deckcardmania in French, with both series and the first-publication dates that anchor this page. Wherever they overlap, they agree on the tier boundaries, with one difference of labelling: the top card of each series, number 160 and number 240, is filed as Ultra Rare by Coleka and given a tier of its own, Ultimate Ultra Rare, by Deckcardmania.

This section adds a fourth record, the French set: 237 of the 240 cards photographed (numbers 129, 131 and 223 are still missing), with the packs, blisters and display box that carried them. Every card has its own page, the products are shown with their printed text, and the rules are restated from the two rules pages. Prices outside Russia and Germany, and the fate of the website, are not yet sourced.