Daiso is a Japanese ‘dollar store’, but don’t let that categorization fool you: it’s much, much better than USA equivalents. This is because Daiso mostly sells its own high quality products, and stocks an incredible variety of items in almost every category. Every trip to Japan includes a stop at a Daiso, and in the past we’ve bought things from laundry bags to packing tape to candy for extremely low prices.
This is the first booster pack for a game called Mushi Jingi. This is Daiso’s first trading card game and was first released in 2022. Each pack contains five cards and costs a mere ¥100 (about $0.64)!
This is an insect themed game (according to Google, the name variously translates into ‘Insect Honor’ or ‘Sacred Insects’) and my cards came in three rarities (Normal, Rare and Super Rare). I assume every pack contains at least a foil SR card, but the backs of each pack show there’s an even rare type (LR) which I assume is even flashier.
Each card has a power, type, ability and text at the bottom. The art is consistent amongst all the cards I’ve seen and is detailed but simple depictions of insects. I’ll translate a couple of cards further down in this post.
The cards are not flimsy and feel like higher-price games but the cardback is a bit dull. I’ll give it props for summarizing the damage rules, but I believe it could have been prettier.
As a game aimed at children, gameplay is apparently fast and easy, and the low price makes building a deck very inexpensive. This seems like it would be a fun game to buy a box of and test drive!
From what I read the game has been a success, and to date there have been seven total expansions. On our recent trip I bought one pack from each of the first six, and the seventh has been released since. The packs depict characters but none of the cards I opened feature any of them so I wonder if they’re used in an associated manga or anime?
Here’s one of the action cards translated, and if you read carefully you’ll see that ‘Tengyu’s Broxade Jaw’ only powers up beetles of the Cerambycidae family. This is the sort of feature I couldn’t imagine would ever make its way onto an English-language TCG, and it is because this game aims to be educational as well 🙂
Here’s one of the SR cards translated, although Google kept Kiniro and didn’t translated it to ‘gold’. This guy is from Papua New Guinea, widely known as my homeland, which means this beetle – the Papuan Golden Stag – is from my clan!
It’s a beautiful beast isn’t it? And if it weren’t for Mushi Jingi I probably would not have learned of its existence, much less that it uses its jaws to cut meat and suck out juice!
As I said I think it would be fun to buy a few boxes of this game, build decks, and give it a spin. It’s so inexpensive that I’m sure parents in Japan have been buying lots of packs for their kids, and I understand why it’s lasted four years already.