GBX Card Series

The GBX Card Series is a set of fan-made Pokemon trading cards done in the style of cards seen in the late 90's ("the Wizards of the Coast era"). They were created by Draco and made available through the Gatorbox Etsy store. The series is referred to as "GBX" as shorthand for "Gatorbox" and in place of a rarity symbol the cards are instead numbered similarly to "Black Star" promotional cards (GBX 1, GBX 2, etc). Originally only a MissingNo card was made available, however due to the residual success of sales of the card Draco decided to start producing more cards in different styles and retconned the original MissingNo card to "GBX 1" and began incrementing the identifier for each successive release.

GBX started as a challenge for Draco to adapt the abilities of the famous "MissingNo" glitch, who is not an official Pokemon and has never seen any official merchandise including cards, into the ecosystem of the original era Pokemon TCG. This idea spread into turning other fictional Pokemon and cards into real life analogues with unique Pokemon Powers never seen before in the TCG. Ideas discussed for future cards include the potential to adapt other glitch Pokemon into cards, such as "Glitchy Nidorino" and other variants of MissingNo ('M, Kabutops/Aerodactyl fossil, and Ghost), or to create unique cards based upon memorable inside jokes from previous Gatorbox streams (Nidoqueen from Pokemon Engrish Green Version, Alakazam from Pokemon Cock Version, and Croconaw who was a stand-in channel mascot before Nessie was introduced). Draco has stated that he is not interested in introducing any of the rumored "PokeGods" (Mewthree, Dimonix, Pikablu, etc.) into the GBX series as he says he wants the line of cards to focus only on either real Pokemon or anomalies that can happen within the boundaries of the games; he is also partial to creating cards that compliment the early years of the franchise.

The GBX cards do not have any particular rarity or declared value and are sold as a novelty, however all of the cards were created with the option for buyers to use them in an era-appropriate retro deck as they were designed and tested in the context of the original release and expansions of cards and do provide a fair and competitive edge against other similarly-aged deck themes. They are not official merchandise and thus are ineligible for professional grading (CGC, PSA, and other services will send them back with a score of 0/UG "Ungradable"). Additionally, the GBX cards are not permitted for use in tournament play.

Cards in Series

Number	Card	Type	HP	Attack 1	Attack 2	Weakness	Resistance	Retreat Cost	Artist	Released
GBX 1	MissingNo.	Colorless	10 HP	Pokemon Power, Item Duplication: Whenever a Trainer card requiring the discarding of Energy, modification of damage, removal of damage counters, or the drawing of cards is played, its effect is applied twice. This power stops working if MissingNo. is Asleep, Confused, or Paralyzed.	Water Gun (20+): Does 20 damage plus 10 more damage for each Water Energy attached to MissingNo. but not used to pay for this attack's Energy cost. You can't add more than 20 damage in this way. (1W 1C)	N/A	N/A	1	André Bardin	June 20131 January 2024
GBX 2	Articuno2	Water	100 HP	Pokemon Power, Quickfreeze: When you put Articuno into play during your turn (not during set-up), flip a coin. If heads, the Defending Pokemon is now Paralyzed.	Ice Breath: Roll one die. Starting from your opponent's Active Pokemon, count until you reach the number shown on the die. This attack does 40 damage to that Pokemon. Don't apply Weakness and Resistance for this attack. (3W)	N/A	Fighting (30)	2	Ken Sugimori	April 2026
GBX 3	Zapdos2	Electric	100 HP	Pokemon Power, Peal of Thunder: When you put Zapdos into play during your turn (not during set-up), flip a coin. If heads, target your opponent. If tails, yourself. Roll one die. Starting from the Active Pokemon, count until you reach the number shown on the die. Do 30 damage to that Pokemon. (Don't apply Weakness and Resistance.)	Big Thunder: Flip a coin. If heads, target your opponent. If tails, yourself. Roll one die. Starting from the Active Pokemon, count until you reach the number shown on the die. This attack does 70 damage to that Pokemon. The Pokémon who used this attack cannot target itself. Don't apply Weakness and Resistance for this attack. (3E)	N/A	Fighting (30)	2	Ken Sugimori	April 2026
GBX 4	Moltres2	Fire	100 HP	Pokemon Power, Firegiver: When you put Moltres into play during your turn (not during set-up), roll 1d4. Put that many Fire Energy cards from your deck into your hand. Shuffle your deck afterward.	Dive Bomb (70): Flip a coin. If tails, this attack does nothing. (3F)	N/A	Fighting (30)	2	Ken Sugimori	April 2026
GBX 5	Dragonite2	Colorless	100 HP	Pokemon Power, Healing Wind: When you put Dragonite into play, remove 2 damage counters from each of your Pokemon. If a Pokemon has fewer damage counters than that, removal all of them from that Pokemon.	Slam (30x): Flip 2 coins. This attack does 30 damage times the number of heads. (3C)	N/A	Fighting (30)	2	Ken Sugimori	April 2026
GBX 6	Charizard 'M	Fire	60 HP	Pokemon Power, Borrowed Code: As long as Charizard 'M is your Active Pokemon, prevent all effects of attacks, including damage, done to your Benched Pokemon. Your opponent's Trainer cards and your own Trainer cards have no effect on your Benched Pokemon. This power stops working while Charizard 'M is Asleep, Confused, or Paralyzed.	--: Flip a coin. If heads, this attack does 40 damage and removes 1 damage counter from Charizard 'M. If tails, this attack does 20 damage to Charizard 'M and the Defending Pokemon is now Poisoned. (1F 1C)	N/A	N/A	3	Louis Kohn3	TBD4

¹ Originally designed as a commission for a San Antonio, Texas business who opted not to purchase the card. It was reprinted in January 2024.

² Based on the cards from Pokemon Trading Card Game for Game Boy Color and use the game's sprite art.

³ Revenue split with The Furry Comic Preservation Project, who also contributed the card art.

⁴ A preview of this card using placeholder art was revealed to the Gatorbox community in March 2026, before the card was released.

Card Features & History

MissingNo. (GBX 1)

The MissingNo card was originally designed by Draco in 2013 for a hobbies & collectibles store in San Antonio, Texas. Draco was commissioned to create a unique trading card for the store who wanted to use it as a way to incentivize customers to participate in their weekly tournaments, which resulted in the added challenge of creating a new trading card that could work within the boundaries of the TCG that also was not overpowered or unbalanced. He finished the card, however the business that had commissioned him to make it opted not to pursue having the card printed. The store retained ownership of the card design as part of the initial deal however, which locked its availability and prevented Draco from making money off of it himself. The business in question eventually closed due to the COVID pandemic and in January 2024 Draco made prints of the card available online.

MissingNo as a glitch in Pokemon Red & Blue became famous for its numerous quirks and odd behaviors, however the one thing it was immediately known for was its ability to copy the player's items. This ability was worked into the card as a Pokemon Power, Item Duplication. The Power effectively doubles every Trainer card that is played so long as MissingNo is the active Pokemon in play by requiring its effects to be applied twice. This has the immediately obvious benefit of turning every Potion into a Super Potion and an Energy Removal into a Super Energy Removal without the need to discard any energy, but it also has a more pragmatic effect by reducing the effectiveness of cards such as Professor Oak. Whereas with a normal play of Professor Oak you'd discard your hand and draw 7 new cards, if MissingNo is in play that discarding would happen twice and drain the user's deck of 14 total cards. Because exhausting your deck is one way of losing the game, this Power makes cards such as Professor Oak undesirable plays.

MissingNo also has one attack, Water Gun, which is a reference to the glitch knowing the move two times in its roster of three attacks (the third one being Sky Attack). The Water Gun move on the card is not unique and its verbiage is copied from other Water-type Pokemon cards of the era; the attack does 20 damage with the option to add up to 20 more points of damage with additional Energy cards.

In Pokemon Red & Blue, MissingNo is categorized with the unused "Bird" type which is believed to have been a placeholder for Flying-type. As such, the Pokemon was created as a Colorless card to match other Flying and Normal-type Pokemon. MissingNo was given 10 HP, a reference to the fact that its in-game defense stat is 0. The card's low HP is the primary way its power is kept in balance as literally any damaging attack or move will knock it out in a single turn.

GBC Legendaries (GBX 2-5)

Originally, MissingNo was the only card available from the Gatorbox store. Due to its success however, and requests from buyers, Draco elected to look back toward the video games to see if there were any other Pokemon or other anomalies that could be translated into era-appropriate cards. The next release, which officially started the numbered GBX series, were four new cards based on the "Legendary" promotional cards seen in Pokemon Trading Card Game for Game Boy Color. These are the cards that are awarded to the player for beating the game, and they are the three legendary birds (Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres) and Dragonite. These cards are unique within the TCG because with the exception of Dragonite (which was based on a specific Japanese promotional card that wasn't localized worldwide at the time the Game Boy Color game was released) none of them are able to exist in reality because they feature attacks or Pokemon Powers that are reliant upon programmatic randomness. The three legendary birds are among the only "official" fictional cards of the era, so as a challenge Draco retooled them to create feasible cards that could be used in a real physical deck while retaining as much of their original effects as possible (and fixing potential exploits at the same time).

Articuno and Moltres had their abilities simplified into rolling dice. Articuno's Pokemon Power (Quickfreeze) and Moltres' only attack (Dive Bomb) were already based around flipping coins and did not need to be changed. However, Articuno's Ice Breath attack randomly targets one of the Pokemon on your opponent's Bench. To translate this randomness, Draco rewrote the attack to involve rolling a die and counting the number of spaces shown in order to randomly decide which Pokemon takes damage. Similarly, Moltres' Firegiver Power randomly gives the player between 1 and 4 Fire Energy cards; this was simplified into rolling a 1d4. Normally the Pokemon TCG does not utilize game dice whatsoever, however these two solutions were the most straightforward way of adapting each ability into an easily understood method that can be conveyed with the smallest amount of text on the card.

Zapdos' card effects required using both coins and dice in order to translate the moves from code to paper. Because both of Zapdos' moves, Peal of Thunder and Big Thunder, have the ability to target either side of the play field this requires flipping a coin as a mandatory first step to determine whether the attacks will target the player or the opponent. Then, one die is rolled and the number shown is used to determine the target. Zapdos was modified further however in order to prevent the card from targeting itself; in the context of the Game Boy Color game Zapdos isn't included in the randomness calculation and because of this a very common exploit for beating the entire game is to make a deck containing only Zapdos and 59 Energy cards. With Zapdos as the only Pokemon in play, who also cannot target itself, this means every turn Zapdos will do 70 guaranteed damage to someone on the opponent's side. To eliminate this exploit from being used in a real life game, should Zapdos be the target of its own attack then the attack simply does nothing and the turn is passed. This prevents the player from using the "one Pokemon" strategy because if the initial coin flip causes the player to be targeted this means that no possible target will be found so the move does nothing.

While the Game Boy Color Legendaries don't exist as real cards they all used sprites based on real artwork that Ken Sugimori had done for the series that did not get used on other trading cards (most of them used artwork from prepaid phone cards). In order to prevent potential issues with copyright, Sugimori's original works were replaced with the sprite-based recreations of them seen in the video game.

Charizard 'M (GBX 6)

Charizard 'M is a variant of MissingNo from the original Pokemon Red & Blue games. It is an amalgamation of various other glitches that inherits the 'M variant of MissingNo's name (the only other one being the glitch located at hex value 00) as well as partial information from Charizard's entry, notably the sprite and type information. This particular glitch occupies the last place in the bank for Pokemon data, FF, and because of this it's also a placeholder that reserves code used for the "Cancel" button in the game's menus. Charizard 'M crashes the game upon encountering it in battle, however it is possible to nullify these effects and force the Pokemon into the player's party by way of hacking or save game modification. While in the party, Charizard 'M's status as being used as a termination character causes everything under it in the party listing to be rendered invisible; players cannot heal them at a Pokemon Center nor use any items on these Pokemon. Charizard 'M itself can only be healed with a Revive or other similar item.

The glitch's unique abilities were brought into the TCG by way of a new Pokemon Power, Borrowed Code. This Power states as long as Charizard 'M is the active Pokemon in play that all effects of attacks and Trainer cards done to the player's Bench are negated as if the Bench was empty. The card's attack is a nameless one represented by two dashes and is a reference to the nameless "Cooltrainer" move from Pokemon Red & Blue. This is a very destructive glitch whose effects are based on the current contents of the game's working RAM but due to repeating patterns in the game code there are a handful of common effects that usually happen when the move is invoked. As such, Charizard 'M's move was given a coin flip mechanic where heads deals 30 damage and heals Charizard 'M by 1 damage counter and tails does 20 damage to Charizard 'M but also poisons the opponent's active Pokemon. The poison effect is a reference to the "TMTRAINER" glitch that happens in-game where the enemy Pokemon adopts a poisoned, frozen, and burned status effect all at the same time and immediately takes massive damage from the burn. Because "burned" was not carried over into the TCG instead the attack causes poison damage.

The card art for Charizard 'M was contributed by Louis Kohn and is a mixed-media painting recreation of a 2013 sketch he'd done for a graphic novel that did not go into production. A limited number of alternate variants of the card were made that use the sketch from 2013, however these cards were only made available via The Furry Comic Preservation Project and not from Gatorbox directly.

Future Cards

Future cards in the series include adaptations of both the hex 00 variant of 'M and the "Glitchy Nidorino" glitch from Pokemon Red & Blue. In the original video games 'M does practically the same things as MissingNo, so while the item duplication ability was used for MissingNo the 'M card is planned to play into how the glitch can corrupt the player's Hall of Fame data. This effect is worked into the card by way of another never-before-seen Pokemon Power where, as long as 'M is in play or on the Bench, the player can at any time have their opponent add one more card to their Prizes (theoretically going over the upper limit of 6). This effect can only be used once per game however, regardless of how many 'M cards the player has in their deck. 'M will also feature Sky Attack as its primary attack, since Water Gun was used on the MissingNo card.

Future ideas for cards include Croconaw, Lapras, and Nidoqueen. However no artists have been commissioned or chosen to make the art for these cards yet. Draco has suggested possibly basing the Lapras card on the episode of Gatorbox is Off the Air, "Bootleg Lapras Goes to the Beach", and using a still from the show as the card art in reference to how some early generation Pokemon cards used photographs of sculptures and other media for their artwork.

Limited & First Editions, and Misprints

Some of the cards in the GBX series are "rarer" than others either due to an intentional limited run or due to mistakes during the production process resulting in "misprint" cards.

• MissingNo. (GBX 1): A single proof of this card from 2013 exists and was stamped with an embossing tool bearing the logo of the original commissioner.
• MissingNo. (GBX 1): The first three runs of cards are marked "GB 1" instead of "GBX 1", as the naming convention wasn't yet established.
• MissingNo. (GBX 1): Some of the second run of cards have slight alignment issues and as a result were sold at a heavily discounted "at-cost" rate.
• MissingNo. (GBX 1): The first three runs of cards (~500 cards) all have a misspelling of "requiring" in the Pokemon Power description. This was corrected in the fourth (GBX) print onward.
• Charizard 'M (GBX 6): Signed proofs of this card were donated to several Corpus Christi, Texas businesses including Tronix and Toy & Comic Junkie.
• Charizard 'M (GBX 6): A variant of the card using 2013 promotional art for an unreleased graphic novel was created for The Furry Comic Preservation Project to give out at their discretion.