Recently I purchased some Chinese Pony Cards from AliExpress and rather than explain what Chinese Pony Cards are dozens of times in the chat, I have made this post to document them.
I quite enjoy the combination of cheap+strange foreign things (see previous Korean Pokemon Card fixation), so I am all over these.
They are quite inexpensive ($20 - $30ish per box depending on the box) but surprisingly high quality. Look up "Kayou My Little Pony cards" if you are interested in getting your own. I don't see much info on these online, hence, tons of pictures.
Each pack contains six cards:
- 1 "Rare" card, which is one of four categories, labeled SGR, LSR, UR, or SSR
- 1 Lenticular hold/3D card
- 1 SR card
- 3 R cards
The randomization is a fun mix and they are all character-based, which I much prefer over many of the english cards which often focused on events or other non-tangible things in addition to the ponies.
The "rarest" cards appear to be the LSR cards and the one SGR, shown below. I only got one SGR out of the 18 pack box so I assume the fancy movie-style Fluttershy here is the "hit" of the box, although it looks similar to the LSRs so I grouped them together. These are very busy and shiny and I like the contrast between the sparkly effects and the flat colored characters.
The next "rare slot" cards are the UR cards, which I got five of. For some reason they have different light purple card back vs. the dark purple for most other of the rare-category cards.
They are very shiny and rainbowy-- very metalic. Not really my favorite effect out of all the cards, but still look okay. The rainbow effect is appropriate for Rainbow Dash, at least.
The final "rare slot" cards are the SSR, which appear to be the most common. These are my favorite! The are super shiny without overdoing it with a good solid character and background. Also approve of the high concentration of fish-ponies.
The holo cards are below. There is one of these in every pack. They are all lenticular and most of them have a 3D effect that give the illusion of the character popping out that's impossible to capture on camera. Some of them look really nice and some of them are kind of horrible and make my eyes cross.
I quite like the one with the Movie ponies in which they switch between normal and fish-ponies depending on the angle you look at it.
The SR cards follow, which are also one in every pack. These are slightly less shiny than the SSR cards and also look very nice. This is the first category I pulled some duplicates of. I would classify these as the "uncommons" when compared to Pokemon Cards.
Finally, the R cards are basically the "commons" at three per pack. I started to pull a few duplicates of these as I got towards the end of the box but still the variety is pretty good. They have a light holo star pattern over all of them similar to the SR cards (therefore, every single card in the pack is guaranteed to be shiny to some sort of degree).
The back of the R and SR cards have some sort of Pony Stats on them, which is the most Chinese thing out of anything on the cards.
Of course, Trixie gets pinned to the Wall of Interesting Cards above my drawing desk.
The boxes came completely smashed up, which is unfortunate because they contain delightful Engrish. I opened the more smashed one, so here are pictures of the less smashed.
Some time after getting the above cards I took another look at AliExpress and found that they were selling a different box for even cheaper with 20 packs instead of 18. These appear to be mostly the same set of cards except instead of the holo/lenticular there is a terrifying dead-eye Funko-pony card.
These boxes arrived in pristine condition! They are also shrink-wrapped, unlike the other box. I am thinking these are last years' cards or something like that, where they used mostly the same cards but swapped out a few of them.
I'll likely open one of these boxes too eveeeentually.
