WWE WrestleMania Oddity - Night 1

 

For the second consecutive year, WrestleMania will be a two night event. The festivities have actually been going on all week since Monday Night RAW, with a different WWE program being televised every night leading up to this weekend. As a result I thought it would be fun to rip some odd packs I found that recently were delivered all the way from Greece. Going in I knew nothing about these cards and even TCDB wasn't much help as they don't even have a listing for these.

These are dated 2015 on the packaging and made by a company called Tesla. I'm not sure if the cards are used in some sort of game, but the packaging does have them labeled as 'collectable playing cards'. Most of the language is Italian if I'm not mistaken as I believe this set was exclusive to Italy. I had 10 packs of what appears to be series III, but I may be wrong as the cards are numbered xxx/132 and I had a good selection of cards numbered 1 through 132. These are smaller than your traditional trading cards and are printed on plastic. The corners are rounded so think a smaller, more rigid playing card. Unfortunately some of the printing did come off on the next card as I was separating the 4 cards in each pack. When I discovered this I started to "flex" the packs which seem to help remedy this.

Each pack originally cost 1,00 Euro which each pack containing 4 cards, 1 of which seems to be referred to as Crystal. I believe these cards to be parallels based on what I pulled and I'm assuming the entire 132 card set is represented in this manner. These Crystal parallels have a Chrome like finish and look super nice in hand. They have an almost texted background, whether it be chains behind John Cena or an etched foil ripple around Billy Kidman.

The RAW roster base cards features a flame design in the background. The WWE logo as well as the wrestler's name (logo?) alternates in the top corners of the card. A replicated signature is imposed over the wrestler's image on most of the cards...perhaps Christy Hemme was too busy looking for her clothes to "sign" her card?

The Smackdown roster received a nice more pleasant design in my opinion with a light blue background that also contained a portion of the Smackdown logo. Out of the 10 packs I ripped, only a few of them were of the blue brand. I can't be sad though with pulled a Torrie Wilson or Eddie Guerrero however.

All of the card backs look primarily the same, whether it's the Crystal or the base version. A red background was used for the RAW roster while blue was used for the Smackdown roster. I'm not sure what the stats on the left side of the card are for, but this is where I assume some kind of game comes into play.

All in all these were a nice surprise. I really wish I could find some more info on this set, including a complete checklist as I'd love to get these up on the TCDB site. I did end up with a few doubles that I'd be willing to trade so if you're interested please drop me a line.

Check back tomorrow for Night 2 of my WrestleMania oddities series with even more bizarre WWE cards!