Category: Cards

Italian Brainrot

March 29, 2026

When we were in Japan, I found these card packs in a UFO machine:

Even though they have Tung Tung Tung Sahur written on them, I had no idea what they were. To increase the mystery, we’d also seen some (terrible) figurines of these characters in other machines. I knew Adam would love these, so I spent a small fortune to ‘win’ a few packs. On the back of the packs, it says this:

Before I left Japan I also found stickers of these characters which I promptly put on postcards. Did you get one?

I scored three packs from the machine, one of which went to Adam, and now – months later – it was time to open mine. Here’s what I found inside:

Eight cards were in each pack, all featuring appalling AI art. It claims to be a game, and if you look closely you’ll see attack and defense values on each card and paper/rock/scissors on the top left. Here’s my strongest and weakest cards:

These are a cheap product sped to market to cash in on a craze that now seems dead. No one played this game, and I doubt anyone even attempted to collect the cards. It’s perplexing they even made their way to Japan, but at least one fool put money in a machine to get some. At best, they were good for a laugh.

Which is why I was amazed the other day when I found this at Walmart:

This is a different set of trading cards based on the same characters! I was astonished enough to buy a pack immediately, but the true surprise – not even mentioned on the outer packaging – was what I found inside:

These cards are plastic and transparent! And the print quality is extremely high:

The characters are as repulsive as ever, and weirdly enough even these cards include statistics (for a game?) in tiny type at the bottom, but the quality of the cards are sky-high. They even printed the backs of each image so they look interesting from each side:

These are as attractive as the ones I got in Japan are repulsive. I may even get another pack 🙂

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.

Robot Claw