The game

rarepepe.party was John Villar's great unfinished work — a Rare Pepe trading-card game in the spirit of Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone and Pokémon, built by his Caracas studio. Cards would be played, battled and wagered on-chain, using the community's own Counterparty cards as the deck. It was an audacious idea: turn a collection into a game, and a game into a live economy.

It never launched. John died on 8 March 2021 with the engine unfinished, and the project has sat quietly since — a whole game, waiting.

The decks: Series 18 & 19

The game's starting decks are hiding in plain sight in the Rare Pepe collection itself: Series 18 and Series 19, designed as playable card sets — Series 19 described by later sellers as “the sole artistic brainchild of the late John Villar.” John minted 60 of the 100 cards himself; other community creators contributed the rest. He was only ever able to dispense a couple hundred of each, and some were never distributed at all — which makes several of them quietly scarce.

The game wallet

The Rare Pepe Party wallet — 12LEpGGUnt2hezVCX234QAXvYJxFSi5QF3 — issued the bulk of the deck and became a living archive of the project, holding not just the Series 18 & 19 cards but a pile of other Rare Pepes sent in by creators for the game. Here's what it held as of the latest holder snapshot: