🕯️ SPOOKY’S FAVS OF THE WEEK

Card: Gengar-EX (Phantom Forces) — bold, chaotic, and lowkey sentimental for me this week.
Song: “Start the Healing” — Korn doing what Korn does best, but in a way that hits the older-me a little differently.

Gengar-EX & Korn — Two Things That Feel Like They’ve Always Been With Me

I have the Gengar-EX from Phantom Forces sitting in my collection, and every time I flip to it, it hits me with this strange feeling of belonging. Not because I ever played the Pokémon TCG — I didn’t.
I grew up collecting fake cards because that’s all we could afford.

When your family comes up kinda poor, you don’t get booster boxes or shiny pulls from EB Games. You get the weird glossy knockoffs from the $2 shop that weren’t even cut straight. And honestly? I loved those things. They were colourful, chaotic, and they made me feel like I was part of something bigger, even if it wasn’t “real” in the official sense. I didn’t care. It was mine.

So now, years later, having the real Gengar-EX — the proper artwork with those wild purples and that unhinged energy — feels like giving y0unger me something she never got to have.

And then there’s Korn.

I grew up with their music vibrating through the house because my whole family are metal heads. Everyone around me was loud, expressive, dramatic — and the music matched that. I didn’t grow up with soft radio pop or quiet car rides. I grew up with guitars screaming through the speakers while someone yelled at us to turn it down. It was messy, but it was ours.

“Start the Healing” is one of those songs that hits different for me. Not because it’s tied to Gengar in any deep way, but because it reminds me of where I came from. Of being shaped by a family that didn’t always have much, but always had music. Of finding comfort in noise instead of silence. Of learning to carry things before I had the words for them.

And somehow, this Gengar card gives me the same feeling — not the same emotion, but the same familiarity.
Like both the card and the song have roots in two completely different parts of my life, and they both ended up here with me anyway.

I didn’t start with the “real” stuff.
I didn’t grow up with the best cards or the best anything.
But now I get to hold the real versions of the things younger me only ever had the knockoffs of.

And that makes this Gengar-EX more than just a card in my binder.
It feels like a small win.
A quiet full-circle moment.