Illustration by Keron Grant.
I forgot to mention yesterday that even though my card scans are often squared rectangles, gaming cards almost always have rounded corners like poker cards, because the rigors of gameplay would swiftly wear down pointed corners. The points would poke your hands (as was still the case if you played with plastic sleeves,) and it would create a point of vulnerability for the card to be permanently bent (or "marked,") and the sides could begin to separate from each other. Another thing that I forgot as I started looking into the VS. System is that I have old man brain, and it would wear
me down.
I've been a little obsessive over the Vs. System, because I realized while working on the
DC Secret Files Podcast that the short form periodical reference books like
Who's Who were abandoned in the '90s in favor of trading cards. They returned in comic book form as
Secret Files and Origins specials, but those were far from comprehensive in their coverage, so you needed trading cards to supplement them for snapshots of the full scope of the DC Universe in the '90s. But also, getting into the 21st century, the non-sports comic book trading card market was virtually extinct, and almost none of those sets featured original art. It was just reprinted, repurposed material from the comics industry. Also, the
Secret Files books themselves were increasingly few and far between in the aughts. But see, collectible card games were still a thing, had a broad scope in service to gaming mechanics, and I finally realized my usual resource
Trading Card Database effectively "hid" these cards in a separate gaming catalog. Suddenly, properties that I'd struggled to find resources to cover were at my virtual, digital fingertips. All these Vs. System posts are the fruit of searches for these cards on places like eBay.
The quality and resolution of these images vary wildly, and the availability of images from the later sets are thin. What I really wanted was to get my hands on the actual cards to pull my own scans. However, most eBay listings for individual cards start at a dollar each, plus shipping, and I'm looking at needing hundreds of these things. I don't want to get buried in duplicates of a card game that I'll never play by buying not-inexpensive boxes, where there are even boxes available to buy. So one day, my gal and I hit numerous comics and gaming stores, plus a gaming-specific co-op "convention" open most weekends on the other side of town. This took up much of the day. We came home empty-handed.
For starters, the only actual Vs. System product we found was at Houston's oldest comic book store. They only had Marvel cards, in packs, collecting dust in a plastic case on a back wall counter. The card I'm featuring today can almost book a rental car without any insurance hassles. Why would I even think anyone would have a decades old gaming system in stock? Even though VS. System had way more releases than the Overpower I did collect, and I saw them being sold in more shops, that was also probably during the Bush Administration. Hell, HeroClix is much more recent, and nobody has carried those in nearly a decade. The only hybrid comic/card shops that I know of to still exist are all like that one-- local institutions-- around my advanced age. Only after did it occur to me that I never see sports cards outside of department stores nowadays, or single trading cards outside of booths in antique malls.
I do see gaming cards, but guess what? That's still mostly Magic and Pokemon. Almost nobody has those bulky cardboard boxes, or even the wooden shelving anymore. It's all plastic and glass now, enough to hold active modern card packs and encase high dollar key singles. Common deck building stuff is what you buy the packs for, and then trade with your community, not the shop. I'm sure the prices come from matching online dealers, because who would bother to print a guide in 2026? At gaming specialty stores, Vs. System isn't necessarily even a memory. How many shops have opened and closed since the cooling of J-horror and the rise of K-Pop, itself an institution now, rather than an emerging scene?
At that CCG convention thing, my gal was going booth to booth with a picture of a Vs. System pack on her phone like we were working a missing persons case. We also called some shops on said device (not helped by her initially asking for "Vee's Cards,") and almost nobody even knew what we were talking about. Here, they had sports cards. There was a stray comic booth where I tried to buy a $3.50 Comics Journal, before determining it was actually a $350 wall book because of some early McFarlane art. There was a tiny representation of comic book trading cards in a few binders. There
were some of those intricate cardboard boxes from back in the day. They did not contain twenty year old VS. System singles, nor should they have.
Why would they? Only an old man who sees that broad expansive of time as a blip, despite my entire relationship with my previously mentioned old lady being contained within than expanse, could delude himself into thinking otherwise. What do I know about modern CCG retailing, or any hobby retailing?
I haven't gotten my regular comic fix at an LCS in near on a quarter century.
And so, back to eBay, casting my net far and wide for viable scans. Probably ordering singles to fill those gaps. And torturing y'all with the product of these efforts. An old man boring you with tales of a card game that could attend college that he never even bought himself.
