Donmai

Precure Cardsets & the Issue of Low Quality Scans

Posted under General

So...I recently remembered the Data Carddass series for Pretty Cure, which launched a few cardsets for every season of Precure starting with Yes! Precure 5 and finally ending with Mahou Girls Precure!, existed, and a lot of these have unique artwork you aren't going to find elsewhere very easily, so I was thinking about picking those up once I wrap up with the Magia Record: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica Gaiden game cgs as I think they're neat. However, there are two problems.

1. I cannot find some of the sets online. These are mainly the early season ones, (Yes! Precure 5 and Gogo, Fresh Precure!, and a couple of Heartcatch Precure!'s lines), but it's still kinda upsetting to not be able to find them outside of hinted at ebay listings and what not (not that I'd be able to scan them anyway...). But more pressingly...

2. The cardlists I could find are either decent quality scans but are from a Fandom source (asset #23357364), or can be traced back to an actual source (like archived cardlists from an official website), but are of such piss poor quality resolution wise (image samples, even) that make me hesitate to upload them, no matter how pretty I think the art is (asset #23357535). I have tried finding better quality scans (or at least something not from Fandom), but the only thing I found was a dead Twitter account that contains a few cards from the latest Go! Princess Precure and Mahou Girls Precure! lines, which...isn't very helpful beyond that.

So while I don't plan on trying to do anything with them yet, that leaves me a little stuck, as I rather like the art here and don't want them to be forgotten...but I also don't want to lower their chances of getting approved for reasons beyond the actual quality of the artwork depicted on them (as I know many approvers dislike Fandom as a source (understandable), and I know I sure as hell wouldn't approve those lowres image samples if I were an approver), so I'm just left scratching my head like..."What to do?"

Does anyone know of any better sources for these obscure cards out there? And if there isn't one, what can I do? Or will I just have to risk it on them, given the circumstances?

Updated

Fandom isn't really inherently an issue if it's the only source you can find and the scan is at least decent, but the sample you provided looks rather terrible and upscaled. The ones on the twitter account seem perfectly adequate. My general advice would be to use the Japanese name of individual series and look for news sites that might provide higher quality samples but for something that was discontinued in 2016 there might simply not be a lot remaining. I found a small handful of good quality samples here - https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/343842.html - although it's only 10 Heartcatch cards.

Oh, thank you so much! I did my best to try and search for the cards using this method combined with SauceNAO, and got not only a Japanese wiki for them (which not only has info the Fandom one missed but does not have the card images themself, much to my immense frustration), and the only other source I could find for some of them were in fact individual card listings on Suruga-ya, but then we run right back into the issue of low quality scans. There just...isn't a lot remaining, even if I can, in theory, find all the cards.

There's also the fact I don't really know where to start with news site. I could only find the one you linked on that site, unfortunately, and it's...a little hard to stumble on news sites with them when I can't name a single Japanese gaming news site, yanno? So yeah, it's definitely something, but that only gets ya so far, unfortunately.

1