>>45742239holy shit I had no idea that Topps did Gen 3 cards what the fuck. I knew Gen 2 had cards but I've never even seen Gen 3 cards. Does make sense, though, since they probably had a licensing deal that went into effect after WotC's, and then expired after WotC's.
>>45743062These were more like baseball cards than actual TCG cards, Nintendo/Pokemon likely licensed them to make traditional trading cards (because TCGs were an EXTREMELY new thing at the time, these licensing deals likely were occurring during '97 since the cards initially came out in '99) to just have random Pokemon shit to throw into stores when Red/Blue launched.
Fun fact, these cards being released is actually the reason that Jungle/Fossil 1st edition runs were so brief, AND the reason Base Set 2 exists. WotC moved up the release of Jungle and Fossil to get ahead of the first series of Topps trading cards, and created Base Set 2 to fill in the gap between the release of Fossil and Team Rocket, since they didn't start working on Team Rocket cards at the same time as Base-Fossil. Had they stuck to the original release schedule, Jungle would've come out at the when Fossil ended up coming out, and Fossil would've have come out when Base Set 2 did.
