Category: Cards

New Japanese TCGs (Part 4)

November 26, 2025

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 🙂

New Japanese TCGs (Part 3)

October 28, 2025

It’s time to open some more packs of Japanese TCGs, all purchased during my trip either last year or this recent summer. Most of these are new expansions for old games, but some are brand new games as well.

Shadowverse Evolve is a physical card game based on the digital Shadowverse card game. This expansion – Duet of Light and Shadow – was released in April 2024 and is the 9th of now 18 expansions for the game (they seem to release about every 2 months).

The cards are attractive, which is unsurprisingly considering the games heritage. There were eight cards in the pack, three of which were foil (the three on the left side of the bottom row). The most unusual card was the knight card at lower right, which was made of thicker card stock:

I wonder if this is some sort of avatar card? Surely it doesn’t get shuffled into a deck since it would stand out.

Shadowverse released a switch version which I enjoyed a great deal, and I hope the sequel gets a translation. I’ve never played this physical version but when I was in Japan last year there was an event in Akihabara that drew enormous crowds. It seems to be a successful game in Japan.

Speaking of successful games, Duel Masters continues to be Wizards of The Coast’s most successful game in Japan, outselling Magic The Gathering. These two packs are from recently released expansions.

Duel Masters has been around for 26 years now, and actually began as a manga (which itself was based on Magic The Gathering)! This card game began in 2002 and has to date received nearly 100 expansions. Two attempts to launch the card game in English markets have fizzled, but it remains one of the most successful card games in Japan.

The first photo above shows the cards in the left pack, and the one immediately above shows the right pack. I played the English Duel Masters when it was released and I remember the game world and ‘story’ being fairly insane and this card art seems to suggest that hasn’t changed.

I buy Duel Masters boosters every time I visit Japan since they are cheap (~¥100) and because the special rarity cards are amongst the prettiest in any game. While this example I pulled from the second pack is dazzling, it’s still well below the most incredible cards I’ve pulled from boosters in the past. This seems like a fun game.

Here we have two Kamen Rider Battle Spirits expansions, one very recent and one from a year ago. I’ve opened Battle Spirits before and I knew these cards would impress.

The above are from the left booster pack. Battle Spirits cards are plasticized and feel like thin credit cards. The print quality is exceptionally good, with super detailed artwork created just for the cards. This is clearly a product aimed equally as much at collectors as players.

I’ve read that each expansion introduces at least one new mechanic which is strongly supported by the new cards, so the game evolves with every new set. This is another game with organized play in Japan that must be interesting to watch since nearly every expansion is based on a licensed property.

The high-rarity cards are very pretty. In these two packs I got one textured foil and another with a sort of spiral foil design that rotates as you tile the card. It’s a shame that a much bigger-selling game like Magic can’t implement these types of foils since it makes the cards feel very special.

We’ll end today with the first three expansions from the new Quintessential Quintuplets card game. This game debuted last year, and I believe five expansions are now available.

Each pack has five cards, and three of the cards in my first booster (volume 1) used manga art! I won’t say this looks bad, but it’s an unusual choice given that they do apparently have enough high-resolution colour art to use.

One card was foil, and the effect was a bit lazy since it was simply a background. But looking close I noticed even the manga art seemed unusually high-resolution, as if it had been redrawn.

That’s the second pack, and again the quality of the art jumps out. Games based around anime often suffer from the curse of simply using screen grabs that are not of adequate resolution to look good on a card. That’s certainly not the case here. Look closely and you’ll see the foil also has a flower effect in the background.

This game is based on a manga/anime about a man that tutors five quintuplets and eventually marries one. The catch is the story begins with the wedding, but since the girls are identical we don’t know who he chooses until the very end. It’s wholesome and very well written and was a massive hit a couple of years ago.

I’m a big fan of the story (the manga is one of my favourite completed series ever) and these cards are very attractive. I can see why this has been a success in the relatively short time it’s been out, and I’ll probably purchase one each of the expansions after these as well.

Ultraman Cards (Series Three)

October 7, 2025

This is the third series of Ultraman cards from RRParks, which once again I got via Kickstarter. This set covers the third Ultraman series, ‘The Return Of Ultraman’ which these days is called Ultraman Jack. The box has been aging in a closet for over a year now, and it was finally time to open it!

The Kickstarter sold out instantly (almost literally: it reached its funding budget in under a half hour) and I’m still amazed that the best Ultraman card sets ever come from a small independent American company (which may even be a single man)!

As with previous sets about a half of the 300-odd cards in the set are story cards, kaiju (monster) cards and reproductions of the original art cards. These are all done well, and once again I’m impressed by the quality of the summaries on the backs of the story cards (one for each episode).

There are four subsets of art cards by the same artists. Included in each box are full sets of most of the cards, but the special chase cards (like the pearlescent art cards in the lower left) are not guaranteed.

The kaiju cards have puzzles on the back, and there’s six different puzzles in total. There’s also a subset of 3D puzzles which I didn’t complete in my box:

Speaking of 3D, once again the box came with a set of glasses to view the 18 different 3D cards:

These are well done and the 3D effect is very good. This technology may be old these days, but it’s still effective and I think more card sets should use it.

As far as chase cards go, I hit the lottery with this box, getting far more limited cards than in my boxes for series one or two (which I didn’t blog). My metal card is shown above, and shows a nice render of Jack flying in the sky.

I got half of the 12 lenticular cards (compared to only one in my previous box), and one ‘Jumbo lenticular’ was included as a box topper:

I also got two printing plates, which are the actual metal plates used to print the cards. In each case I got black ink plates, one for card 124 of the story set and one for the back of one of the 3D cards. Here they are shown alongside the cards they were used to print:

I find these fascinating, since I assume the cards are printed in large sheets and therefore the printing plates must be cut before being included in packs. Each plate is of course unique, but I wonder how many exist in total?

I was very lucky to get three original art cards. These are blank cards on which artists have drawn or painted an ultra character, and the three I got are shown above.

The one in bottom right is most impressive and seems to have been painted with some sort of textured paint. These are of course all unique, and since none of my three are included in the reduction art cards, I’m sure there’s a lot of them. I wonder how many?

The rarest type of card is the autograph, and once again I’m amazed a tiny independent American card manufacturer was able to get stars from this 60-year-old series to sign cards. They are extremely rare though – I read some are limited to fewer than 5 cards – and I believe they’re only included in cases of multiple boxes, which makes sense.

This is a great card set and I had a lot of fun opening it. As it turns out the impetus to do so was the arrival of my series four box, which will now sit waiting in a closet until next years (presumed) series five 🙂

Robot Claw