The publisher
Cards Inc. made and distributed trading cards and game cards. Its founder, Darren Epstein, started it in 1989 after a trip to the United States. A 2021 profile of him records the company’s best-known figures: a turnover of £19.9 million in the year to July 2004, twenty per cent more than the year before, credited to securing licences ahead of competitors and to being a one-stop shop for collectors and retailers. By 2008 the company had moved into toys, making Star Wars and Harry Potter products on revenue of £16 million. It later merged with Master Replicas, a reverse takeover brought in Corgi Classics and Corgi International, and Epstein became chief executive of Master Replicas.
The bottom of the 36-pack box prints the company’s address at the time: Croxley Business Park, Watford. Beyond that line, where the company operated over its life, how many people it employed, what else it published and what became of the card business after the merger are not in the sources we have read. We leave those blanks rather than fill them from memory.
The licence
The back of every pack names who allowed the set to exist. The copyright line reads ”© HUDSON SOFT/TAKARA-BEYBLADE PROJECT-TV TOKYO © 2003 Cards Inc. licensed by d-rights Inc.”, and the d-rights logo sits in the lower corner of the pack back and on the box front. The cards repeat it in short form, “Licensed by d-rights”, beside the card number. What d-rights was and what else it licensed are outside our sources.
What kind of product it was
Cards Inc. did not make a game. The set is a numbered run of seventy-two cards sold in packs, meant to be completed and kept in an album. The cast is that of the first season, before the V-Force names: every blader of the five teams gets a character card and every bit-beast its own card, each team gets a team card, and twenty-two tops are rated with three figures apiece. How the cards work walks through the numbering.
The same year, in North America, Decipher published Collision, a Beyblade trading card game with rules and decks. Cards Inc. published a set to collect. Nothing in our sources connects the two companies.
How it was sold
The pack held six cards: five from the base set and one foil parallel, a shinier printing of one of the same seventy-two. A box held thirty-six packs. The pack back states that there are seventy-two basic cards to collect plus a seventy-two-card foil parallel set at one to one, so every pack carried a foil, and adds that the stated odds are an average of the whole production run and that no ratio is guaranteed in any one box or case. The box invited buyers to order a collectors’ mini-album with pocket pages “while stocks last”, with details on the packs; a collector checklist also lists a separately sold four-pocket portfolio.
Five promo cards, numbered MP1 to MP5 and showing Tyson, Lee, Michael, Robert and Tala, are recorded by both collector databases as exclusive to a UK memorabilia convention. How many were made and how they were given out is not recorded.
What we do not know
The month the set went on sale, the retail price of a pack, the size of the print run and the reason no second series followed are not in any source we have read. Collector databases record the checklist, not the launch. If you kept a receipt or a shop flyer from 2003, the address on the about page reaches us.
How the set survives
Two collector databases list the set today: the Trading Card Database, with separate checklists for the base set, the foil parallel and the promos and a card gallery, and the House of Checklists, a plain list that adds the album and the portfolio. Where the two disagree, we went to the card: number 54 reads Galeon Attacker, not Seaborg as one list has it. the complete base set is photographed front and back on this site, every card turning over to its printed back, with the pack and the box beside them. The collecting guide says what a complete set means and what is still missing from ours.