1980's Blister packs
The numbered blue cards started in 1990, and the patch card offer cards ended in 1978, so this is a middle ground for packaged cars. During this time the quality of the plastic was not great, so there are a lot of brittle bubbles, yellowed bubbles, poorly attached bubbles, etc, etc... Hot Wheels also ran a few subsets (not as many as now) such as Workhorses, Action Command, and others. I am slowly adding to this part of the Hoard, but prices are going up (a lot) on the more desirable or harder to find cars, so we'll see how it goes. Since I am not a big worrier about how clean the card is, I have managed to gain ground on adding these to the Hoard over the years.
Emergency Squad in the tough to find Race Rescue tampos
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It's very hard to complete all of the cars available from 1978 through 1990. Many ran on several different cards, and many were short run, such as the Emergency Squad pictured to the left.
Also, while the US assortments were running, there were several multi-language blister packs, some of which were exclusive to Europe and Canada. Mexico had a completely separate run of cars unavailable anywhere else, Italy had an extremely short run set of bp's, and, most famously now, Leo of India produced cars for YEARS that no one really paid attention to on several different versions of the US run bp's. We will include some shots of non-US bp's in this section, but by no means is this complete! |
Greased gremlin cardsThese cards were used directly after the patch cards, so starting in 1978 to around 1981.
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Old number 5
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land lord
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Workhorses
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speed demons
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ultra hots
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Rainbow road
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pre-blue
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The hot onesThe Hot Ones cards ran at the same time as the Land Lord cards. They were supposed to reassure only the new Hot Ones gold and silver rims, but some normal black walls made it onto these cards.
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Action commandThe Action Command cards were all military vehicles. They ran at the same time as the Land Lord cards. Again, they are not particularly rare, but there has been an uptick of late in prices compared to the same models on Rainbow Road cards or Pre-Blue Cards.
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1990 experimental cardsOut at the beginning of 1990, a few what would be the blue card series came out on this card before they completely transitioned over. They are not especially rare, and they did not make every car on them, with only 10-12 or so being done.
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