Fair Warning: this post is about 3.4 years old, so some of the information might be a bit dated. On the other hand, this post was last modified about 3.4 years ago, so maybe it's up-to-date after all. In any case, please keep all this in mind while reading. Thanks for understanding!
A Quick Diversion:  

The Actual News:

I’m gonna keep this news bit short and sweet, mostly because a lot of what I could talk about is already located on the actual “General Mills Pokémon Promos” page I just added. But…. as I found out yesterday, General Mills’ has a “Pokémon 25” promotion as well where they’re giving out packs of cards in specially marked boxes of cereal. I ended up buying two boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch—which fortunately will be eaten because I LOVE that stuff—and within those two packs I discovered ALL of its secrets. Like how the cards are basically reprints of existing cards, although the holo versions use a special holofoil style that is exclusive to this promo. Or how when the box says there is an “exclusive Galarian Ponyta”, it’s means that it’s “exclusive” only to boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch; packs of cards in other General Mills’ cereals won’t have the Galarian Ponyta in it.

But this is a more collector’s focused promotion, because the cards themselves can be found anywhere else. Well, assuming you can actually FIND them first…

Puke.

 

 

In other news, I actually rediscovered my old Gen 1 Pokémon TCG blanks! And by “Gen 1”, I mean, the very first set of Pokémon TCG blanks that I produced for this site way back when. Take a quick look below:

Oh man! Look how AWF…AWFU… AWESOME these blanks were! They were the BEST blanks ever!!!

Ok ok, joking aside… hey, not too bad for a 17 year old who found a niche to fill! But here’s the thing too, this is where I discovered quality of art <<< quality of story; these blanks were far from the best thing anyone has ever done, but no one cared back then! That was the best part; everyone making fakes back when were more focused on having fun… creating their own dream cards of their favorite Pokémon (or Digimon or friends or whatever), no one gave two craps about their quality. If anything, these blanks capture the unbridled joy of making fake cards… there is so much soul imprinted into these blanks that is hard to recapture today, especially since these were the first ones anyone ever made online for fan use.

Well, it’s not to say that modern blanks DON’T have soul! But like, the soul in these blanks exist regardless of their quality, I guess that’s what I’m getting at.

But fortunately I have history and experience to build upon for my modern fakes… if it weren’t for these blanks, I wouldn’t be able to produce anything like this today:

So for that, I can greatly appreciate these old blanks of mine.

ANYWAYS! Just for gits-and-shiggles, I reuploaded that entire set of blanks—which is only the original seven types, three stages (Basic, Stages 1 & 2) and the Trainer card—over on the Blanks Download page in the sidebar. It’s only the blanks, no symbols or fonts, but I do have links to those files in the other “Generation” blanks sections. Everything can be found in the “PA!’s Original Blanks (1999-2004)” section.

But that’s it for the moment! Hopefully seeing the old blanks brings back a few good memories… I know they did for me. Huzzah! Good times.