What was the 1999 Bandai Carddass Zelda set?

Bandai's Carddass line was the vending machine institution of Japanese card collecting, and in 1999 it gave Ocarina of Time a set of its own: 42 cards, sold through Carddass machines and in boxed sets whose cards were held together with tight paper bands.

The checklist is built like the game. It opens at No. 1 with a Prologue prism card carrying the core cast, builds through character and item cards such as No. 35, the Kokiri Sword, and peaks with prism centrepieces including the Ganondorf prism at No. 21, before closing at No. 42 with For The New Legend, the battle painting it shares with the Nagasakiya set.

The distribution left a physical mark on the set's survivors. Humidity and the pressure of those paper bands worked on the cards for twenty five years, scuffing surfaces and indenting edges, which is why the boxed set that looks like the safest way to store cards produced so many imperfect ones.

Against Nagasakiya's open ended candy set, Carddass is the disciplined object: a known maker, a known count, a first card and a last. Collectors can finish it, and many of its pages in this Library exist to help tell its cards from their candy cousins.