HIDDEN✦TEMPLE
Archive of the Rare
Every card in the 30-card Creatures Deck, the staff-only half deck given to illustrators, staff and collaborators at the end of 2021 and never sold.
The deck is a commemorative half deck of 30 cards, given to Creatures, Inc. illustrators, staff members and collaborators to mark the Pokemon 25th anniversary and the company's 26th year. The published record places the gifts at the end of 2021 and says the deck was never offered for sale.
Twenty-seven of the cards stand for the years 1995 to 2021, one card per year, and the card backs highlight a Pokemon or a Creatures product from that year. The three remaining cards are numbered 011/008, a reference to the company's founding date of 8 November 1995. Every card carries the same gold 25th stamp as the 25th Anniversary Collection, and a first edition stamp where the print it came from had one.
Poke Ball and Switch are reprints of older cards with a number unique to this deck, and their backs carry an excerpt from an interview with Tsunekazu Ishihara and Hirokazu Tanaka. History Gate is the deck's own Stadium card and one of the two cards exclusive to it, the other being Chansey, which reproduces a 1995 playtest card made by Kouichi Ooyama.
A card in this deck is a reprint, so the only number it prints is the number of the print it came from, and this page shows that number only where the two published lists that carry this deck agree. They agree on 16 of the 30 rows, and the other rows print no number that either list records. One row is not agreed: one list records 085/087 for Crystal Energy and the other records no number, so this page names both readings and picks neither.
The 30 cards, the year each card stands for and the print each card came from come from a published deck list, checked card by card against an independent card database, which catalogues the same deck as the Creatures Corporate History Deck. The Japanese card names come from the same two sources. No photograph from either source is copied here: the wells below stay empty until a collector adds a photo, and every contributed photo is credited by handle.