Category: Cards

Mushi Jingi

May 11, 2026

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.

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 🙂

Robot Claw