The collector behind Vault 713

Wizards of the Coast, the company behind Magic: The Gathering, released the Harry Potter Trading Card Game in 2001, timed to the first film. Base Set and Quidditch Cup came out that same year; Diagon Alley, Adventures at Hogwarts, and Chamber of Secrets followed through 2002. Every card in the game is drawn from just the first two books, and Wizards never took it past the Chamber of Secrets film, even as the series kept going for another decade.

What always got me about the Harry Potter TCG is that none of the art is movie stills. Every card is an original painted illustration, and 53 different artists are credited across the game, most of them comic and fantasy illustrators by trade. So the Harry Potter you get here doesn't look like Daniel Radcliffe. It looks like whatever Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling had envisioned before the movies were released.

It was also translated further than most short-lived card games bother with: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese printings all exist at some point alongside the English ones. Promos went out through movie premieres, magazine inserts, and retailer exclusives with no central list anywhere, which is most of why nobody's ever put together a clean, easily-accessible checklist for it.

I read the Harry Potter books more times than I could count, saw the movies on opening day, and put most of my allowance and birthday money into this game as a kid. Like a lot of people's childhood collections, mine didn't fully survive moves, trades, and growing up. The obsession did, though, and in my twenties I started buying pieces of it back and kept going into promos, translations, and pre-production material I never had the access, or the money, for the first time around.

I started posting parts of my collection on Instagram at @vault713archive, mostly to find out if anyone else still cared about a card game this old. A lot of people did: collectors who'd had the exact same thing happen to their own collections, and people who still play the game itself. Enough of them showed up that I figured it was time to turn the resources I was using into something everyone else could use easily at the push of a button.

Collectors and players, equally: this game has always had both, and most of us are honestly some mix of the two. If you're trying to figure out what you own, or what something's actually worth before you buy it, that's what the database and the eBay tools are for. If you still play the game, the card text and lesson breakdowns are all here too.

I also want this to be a decent front door for someone who just found out this game exists. Maybe you fell down a nostalgic Harry Potter rabbit hole, found an old shoebox in a parent's attic, or saw a random Instagram post. Welcome, either way. You don't need to already know what a Lesson card is or why Base Set #3/116 comes in two completely different pieces of art. That's what the rest of the site is for.