MetaZoo has partnered with the skateboarding company Revive. They released their first product. It was focused around their first set, Cryptid Nation. The print run is 2,000 boxes. Each box contained one redeemable promo card and one non-redeemable promo card. For the redeemable card, you could scratch off, enter your code, and get a skateboard deck from Revive. You can find more information about MetaZoo X Revive here. Once this dropped for sale, there was tons of excitement through MetaZoo’s Discord. The product only lasted about 27 mins.

The next drop with Revive was MetaZoo’s 2nd core set, NightFall. The print run was the same. It was released on Friday the 13th. This time the product lasted only 100 seconds. There was so much excitement from the first set people wanted to get their hands on their decks and cards. The photos of people’s decks came rushing in on the main discord, and I believe this generated more excitement. I think the market afterward could have also played a part in more excitement.

The art on each deck is fantastic and fits the skateboarding world. I used to skateboard when I was in middle school through high school. I used to seek out cool-looking art on decks. I would ride them and, unfortunately, end up breaking them. I still would put them on my wall, damaged or not. It was kind of my battleground growing up. I remember as a kid loving Powells Angel boy, Element, Darkstar, or even Girl. With MetaZoo’s designs, I think the little kid in me would have sought one of these boards.

Let us move to the upcoming Caster’s Cup. The Casters Cup will be located in the Dallas Forth Worth area. You can find out more information about it here and from MetaZoo here. The more details we learn about the Caster’s Cup, the more excited everyone has around the community.

A few things we have learned are that they will have promo packs for attendees of Collect-a-Con, Staff, and Players. These packs will contain full holo and stamped cards of previous common, uncommon, and rare cards from Cryptid Nation, Nightfall. They will also include a play MetaZoo Network logo on the bottom. This alone, I think, will build lots of excitement for people who are just attending, staffing, and playing in the tournament.

There will be multiple different jerseys that will be beastie-themed. This is another item that will generate tons of excitement while attending the tournament. These jerseys will have their own promo card.

We also have set pieces that have been created for the blitz portion of the tournament. These set pieces will be rotating. As you can see, this one is of a boat shack? They also will have this huge blown-up Mothman.

With the over $250+ prize pool, the promo packs, the exclusive merch sold at their booth, the amazing-looking set pieces, and the number of players traveling worldwide to come to 1 place to experience MetaZoo. MetaZoo will stream this event. With this new blitz format, I think this is going to be wildly entertaining, not just for those at the event but for anyone watching on the streams. This is reviving the love for competitive play.

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Take these poker chips, for example. They take the time to create each individual chip artwork for each beastie. These alone will be treasured by those who might want to play professionally at a WPT, with their friends, or even just framed and collected on a shelf in your room.

Here is a post-Andy (Chaos Crystal Enthusiast) shared. We will find out what this is at a later date. I just wanted to point out that this is what really stands out in why MetaZoo pays attention to the little details. It’s also the community involvement in trying to figure out what this is that makes following along MetaZoo’s Journey fun and unique. So what do you think this is? We have heard some pretty wild out there responses (Dodge Ball, Car Skin, Dbrand skin for your laptop, a toilet seat).

These 2 are for the Collect a Con Dallas convention coming up May 28th, 29th and also for the Casters Cup (The first huge MetaZoo tournament with over $250k+ prize pool). You can learn more about this here.

The First image is of a players badge which is holographic. This is probably the coolest badges I have seen and I have a nice collection of these. The 2nd is a label for the water bottle that will be sold at CaC. These 2 are another example of just the little things go a long way and they continue to show how detailed, and passionate MetaZoo is in their products.

This concludes this weeks article on a few of the announcements MetaZoo has shared with us. Please stay tuned weekly where I share what MetaZoo has next for us. If you have any questions or even want to just say “Hi”. You can follow me on Twitter.

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We will start this journey with Mike Waddell – The creator of what is now called MetaZoo.

Back in July 2016, while Mike was doing neutron physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he thought of this amazing idea. This idea would spark a familiar nostalgic feel from those who love Pokémon or Magic the Gathering; with familiar mythological creatures and a 4th wall twist.

Mike played Pokémon and Magic the Gathering as a child. He started during the Mirrodin Block, where I feel MTG had a huge peak of new players around that time; including myself. He was now in his 30s, around the age where most of us are having that 90’s nostalgia itch. It was nostalgia that helped create the way of MetaZoo. In 2016 he started playing Pokémon GO and has mentioned that this was a huge influence for the beginning of MetaZoo. It then led to him starting to buy boxes of Pokémon cards during the Pokémon GO phenomenon.

This idea for a card game started getting more serious in 2018, where he would print cards out of his printer in his apartment and test how he wanted the game to play, look, and feel. The idea at the time had him taking notes in a red journal, and sometimes even on napkins. The very, very first incarnation was called MagiCast, and was briefly called Spellcasters, and then back to MagiCast. After Mike having a 5 hour conversation with his girlfriend, he felt that the name MetaZoo was the best fit. The original idea for the card game was to help his girlfriend Jessica with her jewelry business, where they made 24k gold jewelry. There were 115 card designs, all of which were redeemable for different things like loose gems, discounts, etc. They would both work on the game, where Mike did the art, and his girlfriend helped hand-make the cards.

Here are some images courtesy of Mike Waddell of MagiCast concept card art:

Top: MagiCast Logo front card / Bottom: Four SpellCaster card concepts
Credits: Mike Waddell

Why Cryptids? Mike was born in Huntington, NY, and grew up in Brazil. There is a subculture called Candomblé where Candomblé involves the veneration of spirits known as orixás. The Orixas are considered cryptids. These were very prevalent in his childhood. Mike’s mother was big into the docu-series in search of Bigfoot, and Mothman prophecies (even in the story of MetaZoo characters like Indrid Cold who is from this film is a part of the story). When Mike came to the US and was studying at Columbia College, he and his friends would even go and search for Bunnyman in the Bunnyman tunnel. Mike loves the idea of Cryptids because these can be discovered everyday by people around the world. When it comes to even Yoki from Japan, those can span from 100s of thousands of years in the past. There is a rich mythological folklore in all these types of beasties, and this can help gain audiences all over the world. There are lots of shows that do very well that can range from 100k or more that are primarily cryptid focused.

What is MetaZoo? What does it even mean? Well, Meta is more of a play on words. It has to do with the game mechanics where you’re breaking the 4th wall in the game. Zoo is short for Zoological. Mike didn’t want the name cryptid to be in the name, because he wanted to broaden the scope of the folklore in the name. There are many types of folklore (Cryptid, Yokai, Mythological, Religious, Urban Legends, and more).

This brings us to April 1st, 2020 where MetaZoo was born. Mike then had the idea to create a Kickstarter for MetaZoo on June 30th 2020. The rest is history…

Sources: Mike Waddell directly, and interview videos by Argos Anonymous, Pokenomics, KitchenTableTCG, Alpha Investments & TruNerd Studios

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This domain and website was registered on October 21st, 2021. That same day, I started working on getting everything set up and running right, and looking beautiful, and continued to do so over the course of the next few days. Come October 25th, which is today, I started doing the extensive research that it’ll take to ensure that MetaZoo Headquarters is indeed actually your #1 MetaZoo Knowledge Hub, and not just claiming to be like some sort of loser.

You can start browsing around the site right away. You’ll notice that all of the pages do work, but some information is still missing on many of those pages. But I got the beginnings of the FAQs page going, and a few of the Card List pages, most notably the OB9 and U13, completed.

Over the course of the next 6 or so days, I will ensure that this website is filled with a staggering amount of information in and around the world of MetaZoo Games and their one-year-old trading card game that continues to sell out on every new release.

If you’re interested in becoming a Lead Writer for MetaZoo Headquarters, writing news regarding everything and anything MetaZoo Games related, I would love to hear from you. No pay, at least not in the beginning. If you’re interested, leave a comment below.

The news section of this website will eventually be 99% MetaZoo Games related news, and not actual MetaZoo Headquarters website news like this and the first post have been. I am just using it to keep you all in the loop with the development of this website while it’s pretty much in its beta. Expect actual MetaZoo Games news to start shortly around or after November 1st, 2021, around the same time that the rest of the website will be completed.

Thanks for being one of the very first people to visit this site. Hope you come back again real soon!
– Jody Mitoma

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