What are Amada Pokémon sticker cards?

In 1996, the same autumn the trading card game launched, Amada Printing began issuing Pokémon seals: peel-and-stick stickers under the line name Saikyo Seal Retsuden, "Strongest Seal Chronicles." They were sold the way children actually shopped, in foil packs and lottery pulls at dagashiya candy shops, the early packs holding two stickers for about twenty yen. Each sticker is a 50mm square: a Pokémon, its number, and, on the early printings, its battle statistics.

The first set, Hyper Sticker Collection 1 (1996), runs to 203 stickers: 150 plain, 35 prism and 18 gold, closing with Mewtwo at 202 and Mew at 203, plus a special gold Mew numbered 000. The stickers were printed to be used. Their backs carry the Pokémon's data, and the stats on the faces, attack, defence, level and type, fed schoolyard sticker battle games whose rules varied from playground to playground. Amada sold the furniture too: seal cases and Perfect Albums to keep the collection in, and five stickers of a later set were available only with the case, never in packs.

Collectors read the line by its marks. Amada prints its name in red; the first collection exists in two print runs, told apart by the holo pattern (the first run's foil streaks like sun rays), softer red ink, and a faint yellow backing paper on slick stock. In 2005 the line passed to Amada's subsidiary Ensky, whose green mark replaces the red one on the packs, and the numbered Retsuden sequence, by then in the hundreds, simply carried on.