Thanks to a lot of people's responses, I've realized I made some errors in my review and I've adjusted it as follows:
As an avid collector of the My Little Pony Trading Card series put out by EnterPlay, I was interested when I heard they were putting out a new trading and collecting item: MLP dog tags.
After buying a bunch of them, I discovered that they only have so-so quality and many of them come out of the package with small damages. So very mint collectors should beware, you might be disappointed.
I figured I had a lot of fun trading the MLP Trading Cards, so I bought 14 of the dog tags at once. I figured I could trade the repeats if I got any (surprisingly, I didn't!).
First, what you get in each package, which are listed at $2.99 at Walmart and $3.99 at TRU:
1.) the Dog Tag
2.) a tattoo sheet just like the ones in the Trading Cards packages
3.) a 'decal' (a sticker)
4.) the check list sheet (same in every package)
So, the check list that they include in each package shows what there is to collect. There are 25 regular tags, each featuring a character or a symbol from the show. There are also 8 'metallic series' tags that are more rare and are black with a silver character or symbol on it. The tags are double-sided, with a different image on each side. The character ones usually have the character's cutie mark on the other side. Here's an image of the check list:
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loginThe quality of the dog tag itself is so-so. Originally I was very disappointed in the quality of the dog tags, but several people here have pointed out I was making a few mistakes when I reviewed them before. The quality is actually a bit better than I originally thought.
Out of the 14 dog tags I bought, about 5 of them were scratched up or marked upon being taken out of the bag. That's about one third of the ones I bought were damaged when I opened them.
The biggest problem in the quality is the chain that comes with each dog tag can scratch either the front or the back of the tag, which appears to be made of a super-thin piece of aluminum or something similar, with an image printed on either side. There is epoxy on the front of it (epoxy is a clear liquid the solidifies into a plastic coating) and a thin plastic covering on the back to protect the back image (this peels off, which I didn't realize at first). The bags don't have any markings so you can tell which dog tag is inside. They are packaged completely at random.
The chain that comes with each tag looks to be stainless steel, and I think this is where the damage gets done. The metal chain rubs against the dog tag during shipping and can scratch it all up. There is a thin protective piece of plastic on the back of the tag, but a couple of my tags were scratched so badly by the chain that even after peeling it off the image was still scratched. But the plastic covering does protect from a lot of the scratches.
Of the 14 I bought:
3 have a row of dimples on the front where the chain has pressed into the epoxy and left marks
1 has scratches on the image on the back
1 has both a row of dimples on the front and scratches on the back
As for the other items that came with the dog tag:
The tattoo sheets are the exact same as the ones that come in the trading card series (there are new pictures though) and probably work about the same on human skin. I haven't tried them, so I'm not sure about the quality of the tattoo.
The decal stickers that come in each package are a toss up for quality. If the image is large, like the decal of Rainbow Dash, the quality looks just fine. But several of the decals are images with very tiny details that are completely lost when the image was shrunk to decal size. For example, one of the decals is the same image as on the "Queen Chrysalis Poster" that EnterPlay sells. The poster features the giant face of the Queen and smaller images of the Mane 6 fighting Changelings on the bottom. I'm guessing they just took the poster image and shrunk the size in the computer and printed the decals. But the decal is so small that you can barely make out the Mane 6 and the Changelings. Mostly it just looks like the Queen with some colored blobs under her. Other decals with small details that get blurry/smudged include Rainbow Dash's Wonderbolts poster and the cover image for the Daring Do book in the episode where Rainbow Dash is injured.
The tattoos and decals are numbered and both are randomly inserted into the packages. It's not like the Rarity Dog Tag always comes with decal #5, or something like that. So even though I got all different dog tags, I got repeats of the decals and tattoos.
So in conclusion, for the most part the quality of the dog tags is acceptable for a $3 or $4 toy. For very picky merchandise collectors, please keep in mind when purchasing that there's about a one third probability when you open one that the back or front might be damaged by the metal chain.
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