Dave's Transformers Artifacts Rant Playing Cards: Optimus Box, Megatron Box Finally found these at the local Wal-Mart, in the racks that had previously been occupied by Spider-Man movie playing cards. CAPSULE Playing Cards: Available in two different boxes with lenticular dual image art on the front. Art is recycled, but interestingly. Cardstock is thin, but the cards feel decent. Weird choices of what art to use, but overall pretty decent for cheap cards. Recommended. $1.87 at Wal-Mart. RANT The United States Playing Card Company, makers of Bicycle brand cards, got the license from Hasbro to do this set of standard poker-style playing cards. There are two different boxes, but each has the same cards inside. On the front of each box is a 2.5" (6cm) roughly square lenticular image. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, lenticular images use a ridged clear plastic surface over a striped image with two or more pictures interlaced. As you change the angle of view, one image fades out and another fades in (really clever uses these days can create a sequence of a half dozen images). TV Guide had some Star Wars: Attack of the Clones images in this style on their covers a while back. One box has pictures of Optimus Prime in both modes, the other has Megatron in both modes. The fade effect is nice. The back of each card has Optimus Prime in robot mode. The picture is the original box art...modified. My guess is that the original image was fed into a computer filter to make it more like cel drawing art (albeit with much greater detail than standard cel designs). The cards are coated thin cardstock, one of the lower grades USPCC makes (the better Bicycle cards are thick cardstock or even plastic sheet). There are two jokers, one is a big Autobot symbol and the other is a big Decepticon symbol. The art on the cards is the same for each suit, so only thirteen characters are used. These are also the original art fed through a filter for the robot modes, and vehicle art that matches it in style (possible a filtered photo). The art used for Prime and Megatron on the cards is the same as used on the boxes. Autobot and Decepticon symbols are photoshopped into the pictures, sometimes kinda awkwardly. There are no "pips" on the cards, just the number and suit in the corners. Here is a rundown of the art choices, some of which don't make much sense: Ace - Omega Supreme 2 - Warpath 3 - Scavenger (Constructicon) 4 - Smokescreen 5 - Optimus Prime 6 - Thrust (not a conehead in the box art) 7 - Soundwave 8 - Perceptor 9 - Kickback 10 - Inferno J - Megatron Q - Beachcomber K - Long Haul (Constructicon) And there you are. A nice little stocking stuffer. Dave Van Domelen, yeah, still gotta review the Space Team Mini-Cons, I'll get to it in a few days.