If you’re a fan of vintage Pokémon TCG cards like me, you might already know this card.
Nonetheless, I still found some interesting things about this card while looking into the Vending Series that I’d like to share with you.
Topics I’ll cover
The Lose? card
This is Lose?.
A card from the Japanese Vending Series (Expansion Sheet 3) released in November 1998.
You couldn’t get this, or any other Vending Series cards, from regular booster packs. The only way to get this card was to buy a “sheet” from a vending machine. On this sheet you would find 4 cards.
1 of the 4 slots had a “special” kind of card. This could be a checklist or any other “gag” card they released in the Vending Series. Lose? is part of these bonus cards.
Picture: Pokumon
See the top right card, with the different back? That's the special slot.
Who is Imakuni??
The person you see on this card is Imakuni?.
With a question mark, yes. That's part of his name it seems.
But who is he?
His real name is Tomoaki Imakuni.
He worked at Creatures Inc., one of the companies behind the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Illustrations, card appearances, all sorts of TCG stuff.
He also illustrated regular Pokémon cards, like the Porygon from the Base Set.
Picture + more info: Beatrice Baker
So why is he on this card?
Because he drew it himself by hand! And I don’t mean just the artwork. Everything on it is hand-drawn, the whole card.
And this isn’t a one-off appearance he made. Imakuni? kept sneaking onto cards over the years. Most of them were never meant for serious play. They were meant as a joke.
Which brings us to the next topic.
What's on this card?
This Pokémon card can't be used in play. There is no HP, no type, it's not a Pokémon, not a Trainer and not even an Energy.
It doesn't belong to any real card type at all.
What it does have is a lot of Japanese text in random spots:
ハズレ？: the big yellow title at the top. It means something like "Loss?" or "Miss?". It's the word for a draw that didn't win anything.
ハズレってそんなにイヤ？: the speech bubble. Roughly: "Is losing really that bad?" Other sources I found usually translate it as "Even if you lost, is it really so bad?"
ガビーン: the text running down the right side. It's a sound effect, the kind you see in manga or comics when someone gets a shock or a big disappointment. English sources usually translate it as "Thunk".
ぽけもん: on Imakuni?'s shirt. It just says "Pokémon", but written in hiragana instead of the usual katakana (ポケモン).
Disclaimer: used Google Translate for the translations.
The first picture once more, so it's easier to see which text I translated.
Personally, I love this card!
Mainly because it’s completely hand-drawn, but it also fits really well in my binder on my “green pages”.
I've been looking more into Imakuni? over the past few days. If I find some more interesting stories or fun facts, I might share them in a future issue.
For now, this was it!
Hope you learned something new, or at least enjoyed the read.
See you next week!