In August 2022 we told the very sad story a serious Nintendo collector who, after thinking he’d snagged some very special old game cards, actually managed to snag two pieces of worthless cardboard.
The Week of the Games: Return to Hyrule
Before Marios Erik Voskuil thought he’d hit the jackpot when, after years of searching, he came across two decks of souvenir playing cards, some of the best examples of the kind of thing Nintendo made before it switched to video games.
“I can’t stress enough how excited I was to find these seventy-year-old Nintendo cards with Kyoto in the 1950s.” Voskuil wrote excitedly on August 7th. “In all my years of collecting, these are the only specimens I have come across.” To put that in perspective, write in his blogadds Voskuil that this is the first time it has been him always I saw the cards – printed entirely in English – go up for sale after “searching for vintage Nintendo stuff for more than twenty years”.
Disaster when opening:
“However, when I carefully removed some of the packaging, I quickly found that all the cards were completely fused together,” he writes. “They had remained pressed together for so long, probably in hot and humid conditions, that the ink on all the cards had caused them to stick completely together. The deck of individual cards had become a solid brick. The photo prints on the cards, which contain a relatively large amount of ink, may also have contributed to this.”
Note that these cards are old, and so lacked any plastic or laminate we would normally associate with playing cards made in recent decades. These were all paper, so when he says they fused together, he means it. This is no longer a deck of cards, but an expensive pad of paper.
Or so we thought! As Voskuil’s story appeared on sites like this one, it ended up in both news feeds and Google search results, which meant it started reaching out to people outside of the usual video game collector circles. “Within months of putting the story online, I was offered two decks, by two different people, both from the United States” Voskuil writes in an update on his page. “They approached me separately after reading about these cards on this blog.
The first deck came from a guy who runs a Facebook group called Playing Card Exchange and “had purchased a Nintendo Souvenir Kyoto Playing Cards Deck through a discount sale a while back.” The second came from a lady living in Portland. “A copy of the Souvenir Kyoto playing cards was discovered in an abandoned house in their area,” says Voskuil. “Not knowing anything about the cards, she searched online, found my post and contacted me.”
Having made deals to buy both decks, Voskuil now owns them and couldn’t be happier. they are in flawless condition, one of the decks even with the pattern card still attached to the outside, and he’s posted a lot of very high quality images on his website so we can all enjoy the art – and historical significance – of the cards.
