#do ​ppl use their original names or localized names more ?? 😓😓

[mason-ajar]

¡ recently got back into weak hero :) i love these

fools

various gradient maps under the cut

[bunnywand]

i've made several disparate posts abt this before, but here's all the facts i have on a yu-gi-oh related childhood mystery i'm trying to solve:

as a kid, around 2004/05, before we got our own computer, i used to use my cousin's computer and the computers at the local library to print off pictures of yu-gi-oh cards i found, and then tape them onto real yu-gi-oh cards 😅

mostly it was real cards that were too rare for me to get as a kid, but some of them were fanmade ones, either cards from the anime/manga that hadn't been made/released in english yet, or completely fanmade cards, unrelated to yu-gi-oh

the 4 i explicitly remembered before i started looking into this more were: an english version of masked beast des gardius called "masked beast death guardius," an english version of the mask of remnants called "mask of requiem," a card for holactie the creator of light (which hadn't even been released in japan at that point) with a name similar to it's japanese name ("horakthy") and most bizarrely, a card based on "harpy valentine" from the saint seiya series, that i had no idea abt as a kid and thought was just s/t to do with like. mai and her harpies 😅

i started looking into this a while ago when i remembered i used to call the mask of remnants "mask of requiem" and couldn't remember where i got the name from?? after trying to search for it i had absolutely No luck.. but i did land on the theory that it was probably a fanmade english version i found, from when i used to print cards off 🤔

realising that reminded me of the harpy valentine card, so i tried seeing if i had anymore luck looking into that avenue.. and altho i discovered where harpy valentine was actually from, i had no further luck there either 😔

so i gave up looking for a while.. until last night, i remembered holactie was another card i got from that site, and started looking into it again!! and miraculously, i actually found something!! i can't remember my exact search terms, but i somehow stumbled on a site where someone had reposted a fake card in a Very similar style to the ones i remembered, that mentioned "horakti"

but the smoking gun was the "2004 MILES THE FOX" at the bottom of the card, which set off alarm bells in my head 😳 so i googled "yugioh miles the fox 2004" and sure enough..

a bunch of fake cards in the same style i remember, including 1) the exact same "horakti" card i remember from when i was a kid + 2) a bunch of cards based on saint seiya characters, confirming i'd found the right person!!! 🥳

unfortunately, that's where the trail goes cold tho.. 🙁 as you can see in those search results, the only images of the cards that have survived are ones that were reposted elsewhere.. i've found the "horakti" on several other sites (my guess is it got reposted a lot more than the others in the mid 2000s bcos there wasn't an official holactie card til 2011) but whatever site the cards were originally posted on just seems to have Completely vanished.. i've even found other ppl looking for other cards this creator made too, with no luck either 😓

and apart from those few cards on that page of search results, the only other ones i've been able to find are some more saint seiya ones..

which i can see enough of to tell they were by the same creator but 1) like the others, they only appear bcos they were reposted on a (now defunct) blogging website + 2) unfortunately doesn't include the harpy valentine card i remember 🙁

so what next?? i'm not sure.. it feels like a huge breakthrough to have found the name of the creator of the cards, as well as a bunch of cards they made - i'm now Certain this is from who i also found the mask of requiem and masked beast death guardius 😧 but as i said, all other trace of their cards, and wherever they were originally posted just seems to have been obliterated from the internet, so i don't know where to look next.. 😕