Cool cards!
At left you can see the carton that the packs came in, this probably opened up somehow & sat on a countertop to dispense the individual packs. If any one had enough money at once though, you could buy the entire carton for yourself to guarentee rare cards or to complete the set*.
*in the USA at least, a display carton/unit of blindpack stuff generally guarentees to have ONE of everything on that set. So, if there's 24 things, and the rare thing is 1/24 ratio, buying the whole carton you'd get 1 of it. Some things follow rules and others don't.
The right side photo shows the above-mentioned collage set. In this case, the backs of some of the cards are foil too, and each one has a portion of a picture. Tiling them all together (probably in numerical order) produces this scene with Sonic CG in in the foreground, and the other characters are in the back behind him. You can easily see Amy, but Tails & Knuckles are there too. Foil is very difficult to photograpth well.
Card sets made for games will usually use in-game screens for some of the art, and this set is no exception. Here you can see character snapshots with CG scenes behind them for Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, E102, Big, Tikal, Pachakamak, and ancient times echidna tribespeople. They're an interesting selection because they didn't include Eggman.
The right-side cards are all boss cards. Each one has either a number of chaos (including Perfect) or an E-series robot.
The right set of cards each have a scene from SA1 with some descriptive text around it.
Here are the fronts and backs of the same set of 9 cards. They're character art cards that showcased the new SA1 style art for Sonic, Knuckles, Amy & Tails. Each card is a color based on the character. The front has their name and full color art, and the back has a closer-up line art look at the character's face from the same pose that's on the other side.
Notice that the non-sliding Amy & 'sleepy Tails towel' never got used that much, even in the SA1 popularity era.
Incidentally, that Tails in the swim ring art is supposedly the first art where it revealed that nobody has any toes at all. Amy doesn't have toes, (As revealed later in other art) and thusly, Sonic must also not have toes either. Ongoing mystery: How many fingers does Knuckles have? Is it 5 like everyone else or does he only have 3 and that's why he has mittens instead of gloves? 1 knuckle spike per finger...and he's only got 2 spikes so...2 larger-size fingers and a thumb per hand. This is set on the entry because isn't it interesting what official art does for fan theories & 'accuracy' of things.
The character profile card!
Long a staple of card sets, SA1 was no exception with these cards shown here as fronts & backs. Each front has a full color stock art close-up of the character face. Each back has a full portrait for the character, their name, and what looks like a breif bio or facts. (In Japanese) Sonic gets 2 cards, everyone else gets 1, and a chao gets a card too, which is a cute addition. There seem to be 9 of these in total. *It would make sense if there's more though because of Tikal
In the Sonic Adventure 1 card set there were included....
Classic cards too? It seems like a bit of an odd move, but these classic art cards could come up in the packs as well for whatever reason. The art is all stuff you've seen before, thanks to the "Sonic Screen Saver" which was that huge set of art all done by one artist in the same cute and colorful style. It's a little out of place if they were 'pushing the new modern look' to include it, but it's still a nice addition to anything because all of that art set was very fun & well done & well liked.
Here's a sheet of card backs only, and they seem to be enemy themed. Maybe it has the portraits on the front? There's a screen shot or two on the back, a large grayscale...zoom? Of maybe the enemy & some text but it's anybody's guess as to what it could say.
(A tip for battling the badguy, a description of where it is / what it does /etc. could be typical to find)
These look interesting, and in the days before PC screencaps, having a picture of a screen from a game was a bigger deal than it is today. The Dreamcast was pretty revolutionary stuff / look at the time so cards like this would be extra cool in their era.
All SA1 Card set photos in this area discovered by Hedgy, taken by Ebay seller & likely sold for over 600 Euros for everything in the era along with the binders/holders too. There ARE more cards than what's pictured here because the chao+animal different ones are left off & the back of the foil set also doesn't appear. *But, it could in the future if anyone sends them in.
