We’ve all kind of accepted that Yoda’s species is one of those Star Wars mysteries we’re never meant to solve. Lucas kept it blank on purpose, the Databank just says “Unknown,” and even now with Yaddle and Grogu around, nobody at Lucasfilm is slapping an official species name on them.
But inside the Star Wars universe, somebody did try.
During the Separatist Crisis, an in-universe trading card company decided that “mysterious” doesn’t sell and went ahead and gave Yoda a species, a home on a little round chip, and even a ridiculous midi-chlorian count to go with it. For a while, if you were a kid collecting those things on Coruscant, you’d think Yoda was something completely different from what he actually is.
In this article, I want to look at that company—Spotts TradeChip—how their Jedi hologram line tried to “reveal” Yoda’s species, why it was totally wrong, and what that little mistake tells us about how even people inside the galaxy are just guessing when it comes to Yoda.
The In-Universe Trading Card Company That “Named” His Species
If we stay inside the Star Wars universe for a second, there actually was a company that claimed it knew Yoda’s species: Spotts TradeChip Company on Coruscant. They’re basically the GFFA version of a sports card manufacturer, based in the Jrade District and mostly known for smashball and podracing stars.
In 22 BBY, right in the middle of the Separatist Crisis, Spotts decided to cash in on the Jedi’s celebrity and launched a line called Jedi TradeChips. These were little collectible chips with a tiny hologram of the Jedi, plus “stats”: homeworld, species, number of confirmed kills, even their midi-chlorian count. Think playground power-scaling, but marketed to kids.
That’s where they got themselves into trouble. One of the Jedi who saw advance copies was Coleman Trebor, and he was not impressed. The in-universe write-up quotes him complaining about the Yoda chip specifically:
“They have Master Yoda’s species listed as Lannik, and his midi-chlorian count at 4 million. That’s just ridiculous!”
So Spotts TradeChip didn’t just stick a label on Yoda, they picked a completely wrong one. Lannik is a known species in Star Wars (Even Piell is the usual example), and it looks nothing like Yoda’s people. On top of that, they slapped a cartoonishly huge midi-chlorian number on him. Another Legends entry about midi-chlorians even calls the figures on these chips out as bogus, noting that Spotts claimed they were using “the best information available,” but the Jedi criticized them for their inaccuracies—Yoda’s four-million count being the prime example.
Later sources treat that Yoda chip as exactly what it is: a mistake from a marketing department that wanted a clean set of data on every Jedi, even when the real information didn’t exist. The Jedi push back, the whole line becomes controversial, and Spotts ends up as a little in-universe joke. You’ve literally got a Star Wars trading-card company that claims to have “revealed” Yoda’s species and stats… and the story itself tells you they got it hilariously wrong.
It fits the bigger pattern you and I already know from outside the story: even inside the galaxy, when people try to pin down what Yoda is, they’re guessing.
