We have just received our Digimon Card Game 1st Anniversary Card Catalogue a couple of hours ago (which was shipped from Japan on the 31st of July). Let us walk you through the first DCG catalogue, and hopefully helps you decide whether it is worth the asking price of 1760 Yen (excl. shipping).
For privacy protection, we have blurred some contents of the catalogue.
Contents
This book has a total of 114 pages, with card inventories dominating almost the entire book (p5 to p104).
- p1: Book Cover.
- p4: Table of Contents.
- p6: Card Catalog (from ST-01 to EX-01).
- p106: Deck Revival Ideas from EX-01.
- p108: Digica User Survey
- p110: Interview with DCG producer "Gotou-san".
- p112: Advertisement for BT-07.
- p113: Goods Present (Japan only).
- p114: Promo Cards.
There are 99 pages of card inventory (as seen above) beginng from the ST-01 starter deck to the most current EX-01 minibox. There are generally very little information aside from just the card images, with an occasional bubble of information snippets.
After wreaking through 95% of the book, we have 2 pages of small writeups on ways to play the newest EX-01 cards, and a sample decklist. EX-01 is meant to be a revival of sorts for some older cards (BT-01/02 era) so you will see some in their sample decklists.
This is followed by 2 pages of User Survey, ranging from their favorite deck colors and most-played card effects.
And after that, we have 2 pages of interview with the producer Gotou-san, which would make quite a relaxing read (if you can understand Japanese).
Nearning the end of the book we have a 1 page advertisement for the upcoming BT-07 set, featuring Kouta, Dorumon, and Dorugoramon which would be a highly exciting tease if not being heavily leaked a week ago.
And at the last page we have the 2 limited promos [P-047] Aeroveedramon Zero and [P-048] Ulforceveedramon Zero enclosed in a standard cardboard envelope.
Print Quality
The catalogue is a magazine-sized soft-cover book printed by Shuesha (of V-jump fame). The pages are waxed and thicker than most magazine pages. Every single page is a colored, and has a fairly decent print quality (not the most brilliant prints you'd see in artbooks).
Should You Buy It?
In our opinion, there is very little exclusive content in this book that would garner it's price tag of 1760 Yen (since 95% of the contents are pretty much recycled images).
Even if you are new to this card game, it would make more sense to collect the actual cards yourself (in a binder) rather than flipping through a book for an image of that card.
However, the draw that we believe most people buy this book for, would be the 2 exclusive promo cards included in this book. Unlike standard magazine-distributed promo cards (where players actually want to read the magazine or plays the other card game), the only way to get these 2 cards is to buy this catalogue. And since nobody will buy this book for the book itself, it will be rather difficult to find these 2 cards in the secondary market at a price point lower than the retail price of this catalogue.