Replica of the LizardMaster Pocket Monsters trading card from the Canadian edition of the Pocket Monsters Trading Card Game.

By 1999, consumer clamor for ‘Pocket Monsters’ [or, “Pokémon”, as it is commonly known outside of Japan and Canada] had reached a delirious frenzy, and the products of the Japanese-owned entertainment franchise were rapidly localized for global consumption. Among the video games and television cartoon programs was a modular board game sold in variable lottery packs called the “Pocket Monsters Trading Card Game.”

Canada’s persistent refusal to join a North American trade union meant that products produced in English for the broader Anglosphere were inadmissible into the protected domestic market, as they typically failed to adhere to bilingual language regulations. A year following the global expansion of the Japanese product, the Canadian Localization and Design Crown Corporation released what would be one of its final major projects: all-Canada-legal bilingual Pocket Monsters cards. These cards were necessarily produced without reference to the Wizards of the Coast translations made in America, allowing the Canadian cards to feature their own unique design principles.

In the two years that followed, the end of the Quebec Conflict and the birth of a North American free trade regime would see the discontinuation of the Canadian Pocket Monsters cards as the 20th-century protectionist walled garden birthed by language laws crumbled, allowing a flood of American products and conventions.

Within the esoteric world of Pocket Monsters collecting, these cards are uniquely valuable; so, in an effort to make an icon of Canadian cultural nationalism available to the masses once again, LMX Unlimited has reproduced the most iconic of Pocket Monsters cards, the Base Set, First Edition, LizardMaster as an archival replica.