X-Men Trading Card Game
| Designer(s) | Mike Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Publisher(s) | Wizards of the Coast |
| Players | 2 |
| Playing time | Approx 20 min |
| Random chance | High due to dice rolling |
| Skill(s) required |
Card playing Arithmetic Basic reading ability |
Released by Wizards of the Coast in 2000, the X-Men Trading Card Game was a collectible card game (CCG) designed to coincide with the popularity of the first X-Men (film). This set had featured character art similar to that of X-Men (film) and included characters who did not appear in the movie.
The X-Men Trading Card Game was a joint-release of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. (WotC), Marvel Entertainment, and Twentieth Century Fox. All three companies involved with the game required that certain stipulations be met in the final product. WotC was responsible for the structural design of the game; Marvel was to provide the artwork; Fox determined the overall look of the characters depicted in the cards (to wit, the black leather outfits worn by the actors of Fox's X-Men feature film). The game's only promotional cards featured Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, and James Marsden as their respective movie characters. The Hugh Jackman "Wolverine" card was distributed at cinemas to moviegoers purchasing tickets to X-Men and the Halle Berry Storm card was given to customers at hobby and game shops. The remaining promotional actor cards were slated to be awarded as prizes at sanctioned X-Men TCG events, but neither tournaments nor competitive leagues were ever established. Consequently, it is believed among fans of collectable cards that these undistributed promo cards rank among the all-time most-difficult acquisitions in all of collectable gaming.
Apart from the American region encompassing Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska—where the creative efforts of that area's WotC-assigned regional representative consistently brought notable and surprising turnouts to X-Men TCG events—the game was stillborn upon release in the summer of 2000. This eventuality came about for one reason; the passage of time between the release of the game's starter decks and booster packs. Starter decks are the skeletal structure of any new release in the TCG industry, as they introduce players to the game and provide the rules by which the game is played. But it is the booster packs, with their expanded card selection and random distribution, that flesh a TCG out, making the cards into collectibles and providing the means for refining and individualizing a player's deck. Delays from the Marvel art department brought the project to a screeching halt. The outcome was that the booster packs did not hit store shelves for months after the release of the starter decks. Furious fans were further frustrated by the finished portfolio. To the astonishment of many fans, the final art was universally panned, the last in a series of marketing failures for the X-Men TCG. The sub-par work was epitomized by the fact that a large number of the cards' artist credit was simply listed as Marvel staff. Despite a small blip of sales in the U.S. region, the booster packs generally debuted on clearance racks in the few stores that decided to order them.
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