🕐 Reading time: 3 min
It all started in front of a vending machine.
I was eight or nine years old. Back then we knew nothing about booster packs. Dragon Ball Z cards came out of a machine: one coin, one card, and that alone was an event. Carddass Power Level, imported from Japan. Boosters only arrived later, when the French version came out, around 1996.
We already loved the manga. So holding those images between your fingers was incredible. We never wondered what they were worth. Market value, price, rarity, none of that existed for us. The goal was simple: get as many as possible, and above all, get different ones.
What made all the difference was the artwork. Every card pointed to a precise scene, a character, a moment of the manga we had in mind. We were not collecting pieces of cardboard, we were collecting memories of stories we loved.
I did not really have a dream card, what I wanted was simply more of them. But if there was one kind everyone was after, it was the prisms: the shiny ones. And the most coveted of all were the double prisms and the hidden prisms. The idea was clever: two cards in one. You could peel off the top layer to reveal a second card hidden underneath, shiny as well. On a double prism, both were shiny. That was the rare piece of the playground, the one you barely dared to trade. Years later, the Pokémon Company took exactly that idea for the Pokémon GO set and its Ditto hidden under another card, which you peel off to reveal the Pokémon underneath. The same surprise, one generation later.
In the playground, they were traded with friends. And at home, I collected with my brother. Nobody passed this down to us, it just happened, between kids. But my brother and I shared that passion for years. And we still share it today.
Later, in secondary school, Dragon Ball Z gave way to Magic the Gathering. There we really played, and I even entered a few tournaments with classmates. Pokémon only came much later, when my nephews arrived. The games changed, the urge stayed the same.
Today the nostalgia is there, of course. But what has always held me is the collecting side, carried by the artwork. Over time the eye of someone who knows what things are worth was added to it. A mix of the two: the kid who found the illustrations beautiful, and the adult who now knows what he is looking at.
If you ever knew a vending machine, a playground full of trades, a brother or a friend you opened your cards with, then you know exactly what I am talking about. Dojo TCG was born from that. From precisely that.