Cards – Page 2 – Robot Claw

Trading Cards Purchased From Bootleggers

May 27, 2026

We drove back to Newcastle yesterday, and I’m now at mum’s. I won’t blog as frequently here, but right now I’m going to showcase some exclusively Australian trading cards games I obtained from reputable sellers at a location in Sydney. I won’t tell to exactly where this market is, but it rhymes with ‘Paddy’s Markets’ 😉

Let’s begin with Lilo & Stitch. This trading card game – which isn’t a real product and only the product of smugglers – labels itself as ‘new’ and seems to be based around a larger Lilo universe that I have no knowledge or indeed interest of.

The pack – which cost me $3 – contained 8 cards, each featuring a loveable character from the franchise. All cards have attack and defense values and a rock/paper/scissors mark so this can be played multiple ways by even imbeciles. Amusingly the statistics are ludicrously inflated: with most in the high hundreds of thousands.

The front of each card is foiled with a nifty starburst effect, but the backs (see the first pic) are matte and uncoated and I imagine if you got these wet they’d ruin quickly. Quite a risky feature considering these would have been shipped to Australia on galleons from the far east!

This is of course a worthless product as a game, but intriguing for hardcore Stitch fans. My analytical brain tells me this is probably influenced by Lorcana, but I think that may be giving the bootleggers too much credit.

I’m not a fan of Demon Slayer – I found the characters insipid – but in the interests of research I had to buy this illicit card pack. Much like the above, this cost $3 at the blackest of markets.

Were I a betting man I’d suggest these were produced at the very same factory the previous cards were (and these in fact) since the size, card stock, print quality and foil effect are identical. That is except for one card – top left in the above photo – which mysteriously has a different foiling from all the others.

The pack contained seven cards, and as a game this seems even simpler than Stitch since each card only has attack and defense values. There’s some flavour text in the form of attack names (“Breath of Rain in Love with Cats“?) but this has no bearing on play. A worthless game therefore, albeit about a very popular series.

It’s worth noting these are in English – not Japanese – and I do wonder if the audience for this game is as large in occidental ports? Maybe the bootleggers miscalculated spending their valuable production time on this one?

Now this is a more marketable ~~illegal~~ product! Everyone loves Spider-Man, and who wouldn’t want a pack of game cards for a film the sequel of which seems like it’s been delayed forever?

Once again we have the same type of cards produced at the same factory using the same materials. However these ones are all slightly bent, and some of them were dirty! This suggests the factory was in somewhere like Tortuga, and indeed I can almost smell the rum on the cards.

Gamewise (I know, I know…) these adhere closely to the system introduced by Stitch and I think I can confidently say they have the same game system and can therefore be played together as one weird multiversal TCG.

Players that attempt this should be careful: with the exception of Ultimate Spider-Man all the cards in this pack had much lower atk/def values and would be effortlessly defeated by any of the Stitch cards!

While this is another worthless product, it’s also Spider-Man which means of interest to collectors. I don’t doubt they would like a pack or two for amusement value.

One of the hottest brands out there right now is undoubtedly K-Pop Demon Hunters and in a shocking upset the first to market with a TCG are the same pirates that produced everything else I’ve shown today!

It’s all the same again as Stitch and Spider-Man, only the statistics on these cards have a wider variance, with some weaker than any in Spider-Man and others so strong to be able to defeat anything from any previous pack.

I know you’ll be shocked to hear that (unlike all the others I’ve opened so far) the QC on these cards is atrocious! Not only is the foil layer lifting on a couple of them, but three had serious damage to the edges. Not only would this make them illegal in a sanctioned tournament, but it would greatly reduce their value if sent for grading. Shame on you, pirate TCG bootleggers!

And that’s all I’ve found (so far) in the category of bootleg trading card games… but I do have this other mysterious box:

This was found in a cavernous dollar store in Orange and purchased from a lady whose face had never known a smile. It’s about as big as a box of cigarettes, and this is what was inside:

The box label was correct: it contained exactly 60 cards and 36 stickers. This isn’t a game, so the cards are just pictures, but they’re all different and the print quality is excellent:

There’s no foil effect and the backs (the top left card above) are matte, but if you’re a fan I think these would be a good buy for the price.

However if you’re a Saja Boys stan, step back! These are the Huntrix girls only, which makes me wonder if there was another pack with the boys in it?

And as for the stickers… watch your postcards 🙂

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 🙂