How a Peruvian magazine ended up with a Beyblade card set

Kidy’s was not a card company. It was an anime magazine, published in Peru by the newspaper La República from 1999, covering the series that were actually on television there — Dragon Ball, Digimon, Pokémon, Sailor Moon, later Ranma ½ and Evangelion. Readers sent in letters and drawings and saw them printed beside the characters, which is the part people remember.

The magazine stopped in 2002, came back in 2003, and Beyblade was one of the titles added on that return. That is the whole documented connection between the name on these cards and the publication it belongs to. The article that records it does not mention cards at all.

Which leaves the year unsettled

The year is not settled. Listing titles say 2002 and the same seller's own item details say 2001; our earlier note, from PSA's acceptance list, says 2002; and Kidy's magazine only began covering Beyblade when it returned in 2003. No card carries a printed date.

We are not going to pick one. A set with a contradicted date is a more useful record than a set with a confident wrong one, and the contradiction is itself a finding: whoever eventually turns up a pack or an album will settle it in a sentence.

What the cards themselves say

Every card carries the same rights line down its right edge, naming Hudson Soft, Takara, the Beyblade Project and TV Tokyo, licensed by d-rights. Hudson Soft made the Beyblade video games, and their name appears on none of the other card games documented here — not Decipher’s, not Broccoli’s, not Cards Inc.’s, not DeAgostini’s. Whatever these cards were, they came out of the video-game side of the licence rather than the toy side.