Time for some more opening of TCG card packs, and yes most of these still date from my summer Japan trip. I’m good at letting packs of cards ‘age’ before opening 🙂

Weiss Schwarz is a Japanese game that’s been going for over 15 years now and has well over 100 expansions. It’s famous for all the expansions being based on licensed properties, and a large percentage of anime from recent decades seem to have had a Weiss expansion.

Here I’m opening packs from Goddess Of Victory Nikke, Azur Lane (both are gacha games) and Dandadan (a current anime). Each pack contains 8 cards, at least one of which is foil. The Nikke cards are shown above and are attractive, but somewhat boring as game cards.

At first glance the Azur Lane cards are very similar, and I think this is a weakness (or maybe strength) of this game, since the cards can be so alike they look formulaic. Both the Nikke and Azur Lane cards use art taken directly from the games.

The Dandadan cards use art from the anime, which I feel are mostly unattractive which is a crime since it’s such a well-animated show. You’ll note by the way that all these cards have a load of minuscule-font text, which is a feature of Weiss that is often criticized.

As for the game itself… I have no comment. Something you’ll often hear about Weiss is ‘no-one plays it’ and it’s almost exclusively a game for collectors. Whether this is true or not I don’t know, but I imagine the publisher hardly cares since it’s currently riding the highest success it’s ever had.

Here’s another Divine Cross card pack, this a licensed set based on a game called Duel Princess. As with the Divine Cross set I previously posted about, the existence of this game is a mystery to me and its choice of licensed properties even more mysterious!

The cards are extremely colourful and attractive, and the foil example (middle bottom) shines like a rainbow in the light. These are much more visually appealing than the Weiss cards shown above, which makes me wonder why this game isn’t more popular.

The answer of course is the choice of properties: Duel Princess is an obscure Japanese indie tactics RPG that was briefly famous for being pulled from the Switch story within a day or so of release. I found this out because I had planned on buying it 🙂

Hololive is a very deep rabbit hole, but the short version is that it is a collection of ‘Virtual Idols’ that began on YouTube and have since expanded into all types of licensing. Now there’s a much-hyped card game, and even more surprisingly one that has seen a US release!

The cards are a bit boring on the whole, but the special ones are very attractive. The second from left in the top row is a full art textured holo card, and if you’re a fan of that character you’d probably love to own it (and indeed it’s currently $6 on secondary markets).

But once again does anyone play this game? I doubt it. And with the cards mostly being unattractive, does this even have a future as a collectible? I’m skeptical.

Here’s Oshi Push another Vtuber card game which I think is from a Hololive competitor. This one was kickstarted two years ago and recently made it to general release. I’d never heard of the game or the characters before buying this pack. (And I may be bending the rules here since I’m not sure a Japanese version of this exists.)

I feel like a broken record in this post but the cards are a little boring. This is I feel a weakness of all these vtuber stables: with so many characters only a feel stand out and the others all look generic. There’s nothing on these cards that stands out to me.

There were two foils, with one of them much sparklier than the other. This card had a different feel as well, as if it was slightly thicker due to the foil layer. Probably not ideal if this is supposed to be a competitive game!

But again, I doubt anyone is actually playing with these cards.

And largely we have the new Godzilla card game. This was briefly difficult to find – I wanted to buy a pack in Japan and couldn’t find it in stock – but seems to have failed since it’s everywhere now.

The cards are photos from movies, and as you can see look ok if you’re a fan, but I would have preferred actual art. Indeed this game suffers from the same issue the new Ultraman TCG has, where the cards are much less attractive than Godzilla cards in other games!

I did get this card in my pack. It’s rainbow foiled, textured and has raised gold printing. In fact it’s possibly the nicest card I’ve ever pulled from an American TCG pack. I looked online and it’s only ‘worth’ $1 so it’s hardly a treasure, but were I a super Godzilla fan the chase for these super fancy cards would certainly tempt me to buy more packs 🙂