So if you haven’t heard, Jamboree was a never-released Pokémon TCG card set that Wizards of the Coast had planned for release that was going to have 100% their own card designs and utilize Western artists for. There’s a whole video about it by Matt Matoba that I think is worth watching if you want the full story (and you might hear your’s truly in it!)
Matt’s video brought up something that I didn’t realize at the time—but did greatly suspect: the EX Sandstorm set had cards that might have been from Jamboree! Specifically, EX Sandstorm was the International release of what was called “ADV 2” in Japan. However, as I noticed right away back during their original release, the International release had effectively 46 more cards in them relative to their Japanese counterparts (100 cards vs 53 cards)… yet those new cards had no prior Japanese equivilant ever. Did we get new cards before Japan?? Where did those cards come from? Well, apparently they had their ultimate origin from Wizards’ Jamboree set.
That said, the cards released in EX Sandstorm were not the same exactly the cards that were developed for Jamboree. For example, here’s a comparison of the Jolteon cards from both Jamboree and EX Sandstorm (well, the Jamboree card itself is a colab between Matt and myself, but the card text is legit confirmed):
So obviously some of it got reworked in its eventual release. But it looks like some hints of its history as a Jamboree card still persists? It’s also obvious tho that bare minimum there was Japanese artwork created for the set—maybe as a compromise?—so it might just be that the Japanese art-based card might have been what ended up being released in EX Sandstorm. In any case, knowing that those cards added to EX Sandstorm had a history with Jamboree does give us a small taste of what might have been.
And that’s what I want to do with this page: design a hypothetical Jamboree set. 46 cards doesn’t a set make, but consider that Jamboree was supposed to be more than just the cards that Wizards designed, it was also a way to release all the other cards that they had the rights to but ultimately never did (something they also planned for the unreleased “Crosstrainer” set). I guess some of that might have included cards from the Vending Machine set, but we already made a What If? set for that called Safari Zone HD Remaster. So for this thought experiment, let’s assume Vending Cards are not included. So what’s left?
(To be added! Sorry to leave with a cliffhanger, but this page is still being worked on. Come back soon!)