Category: Cards

Con Haul

August 26, 2025

Here are some of the items I got at the con. I’m not including the half dozen or so volumes of manga (mostly isekai trash) or the many stationary items (postcards and stickers) since I haven’t yet decided which will be gifts and you may even see a postcard in your mailbox one day.

The above is an English ‘special edition’ of the Weekly Young Magazine, a Japanese manga weekly from Kodansha. This is a hefty (1000+ pages) volume containing the first chapters of 14 series translated into English. Readers can vote on which ones they want to see serialized, but it’s unclear whether this format (an anthology magazine) will continue or if they’ll be serialized online.

This is a beautiful book, printed in Japan and with the same feel as the Japanese anthologies. I had to join a longish line to get one (for free) at the con, and the next day I saw a big pile just sitting around for the taking at Kinokuniya in the city!

This is a vinyl figure of a kaiju that I bought from the designer. The monster itself is from an old (1980s) Korean film which I’d never heard of, but the guy who designed this figure also designed two of the kaiju in the recent Godzilla x Kong film and had a few impressive 3D prints of his work on display. His was a somewhat out-of-place booth for an anime con but I’d been looking for a vinyl kaiju figure and this one wasn’t expensive and scratched the itch.

There were hundreds of anime figures available, almost all of the prize variety. I’ve got loads of these BiCute girls, and picked up the above two at the con. Prices were extremely good – possibly due to competition? – and had I more space I probably would have bought more.

Bandai had a display and shop for Gundam kits, as well as an area where you could sit and make a beginners version for free. I charmed the dude into letting me take one! I like that it’s on a single runner, and will certainly assemble it one day.

I got the above clear file at the Japan Tourist Board exhibit. I was just throwing all the free handouts into my bag and didn’t even notice it was a clear file until I got back to the hotel. It promotes a 2022 short anime that reimagines Japanese castles as transforming robots, which was partially funded by local tourism agencies.

Loads of exhibitors were selling TCG cards, mostly Pokemon and One Piece, but one booth seemed to specialize in Weiss. I’d been considering buying a Weiss box for a while, they had them for a decent price, so I bought this Nikke one. I’ll let it age a year or few before opening.

Speaking of TCGs there were also a few being launched at the con. They all had the whiff of scam about them – companies wanting to cash in on the current TCG mania – but I wasn’t going to decline a free promo card. Maybe I can sell it for a fortune and retire one day. Or maybe not 😉

I’ve put most of ‘the cute stuff’ together. This is what I bought specifically for Kristin, and all of it came from artist alley booths. The envelope with Korean text is a blind pack of animal stickers, and the frog pin was also a blind box item. The bottom left is a capybara coaster. Had KLS been with me we would have purchased much more like this!

Even though it wasn’t a con purchase, here’s a bonus pic: dollar-bin comics purchased at Midtown Comics. I have no interest in recent superhero comics, but always find the late 80s and early 90s stuff a fun read. I wonder which of these will be best and which worst?

The Blackest Of Markets

May 30, 2025

Yesterday I went to Charlestown Square, and I discovered what was once a venerable shopping center has now become the abode of pirates. Bootleg Labubu, bootleg Sonny Angel, bootleg Crocs charms, bootleg anime figures, bootleg Pop Marts, bootleg retro game consoles and all many of other things are sold at stalls openly by outlaws to unsuspecting (I hope) shoppers.

In the interests of further investigation, I purchased this:

This is a set of Mario Bros TCG game cards, in a lovely tin no less. No such TCG exists, so whatever is in this tin is a false product, undoubtedly peddled to me by a malefactor. You’ll note that the lower left contains the ‘expansion’ name: Scarlet & Violet Paldean Fates. This is of course false as well, because all the outlaws that made this product have done is stolen the logo from a recent Pokémon TCG expansion:

The item was listed as costing $9.99, but a sign advertised that it was 50% off and only $4.99! Strange therefore that the price tag was under the shrinkwrap:

In other words, the sale was a lie as well. It’s also worth pointing out that the tin itself had some rust on it:

They probably manufacture this on their pirate ships at sea, and don’t have the knowhow or inclination to protect the product from the briny sea air.

Opening the tin we find a shrinkwrappef pack of cards. Immediately many questions are raised, but I’ll get to them in a moment.

The product contains five foil cards (shown above), and 40 normal cards:

The quality is very low, with flimsy almost-cardboard cards that don’t appear to be coated. I’ll give them that the print quality is decent and all cards are unique (somewhat), and that they do indeed depict Mario-related images. This is the cardback:

This is sold as a TCG: a trading card game. I am inclined to challenge the ‘T’ in this moniker: are there additional cards in this game that I could in theory trade someone for? There were four different tins, but surely they didn’t contain different cards?

As for the ‘game’ part of the description… I’ve played a lot of TCG’s and have a good grasp on the way such things work but this one is puzzling. Let’s consider an example card:

I’ve put pink boxes around the four areas that (I assume) are game elements: the number in a circle in top left, the two numbers in shapes in lower right, the face (Peach in this example) in a circle in lower left and the ‘Attak’ and ‘Energy’ values at the bottom.

Naturally the swashbucklers that produced this didn’t include any instructions, so it’s left to the buyer to work out how to play this game. There’s no resource cards, so the number in top left is a bit of mystery since one obvious explanation would be a casting cost. I’ll get back to that number in a moment.

The two values in shapes look like strength and defense stats (or, to use MTG parlance, ‘power’ and ‘toughness’). This is a likely and obvious explanation, since all successful TCGs have such a system. But if this is true, then what of the ‘Attak’ and ‘Energy’ values? Do these cards have two different sets of power and toughness?

Things get more mysterious when we examine the two versions of this Luigi card. The one at left is one of the foils, and as you can see all the values are different. It’s ‘casting cost’ is 1 compared to the normal 3, it’s ‘power’ and ‘Attak’ are both lower, but it’s ‘toughness’ and ‘Energy’ both higher. Does this make it a better card? Who knows?!?

And then comparing these five cards – all with different ‘casting costs’ – we see there doesn’t seem to be any logic in any of their stats. In every way, the card costing 3 in the middle is superior to the one costing 5 at the left, so the ‘casting cost’ is no correlation to the other values. Even the ‘power’ and ‘toughness’ values are unrelated to Attak and Energy.

Let me be clear: this is a game created by villians, no doubt intended to be played in a rum-stinking moon-lit ship’s hold by buccaneers with a deck in one hand, a cutlass in the other and a parrot squawking advice over their shoulder. I’ve no inclination to believe this is an actual game and all values aren’t just random, but I’m considering the possibility that it might be.

So if you’ve fallen victim to this criminal swindle: if by bad luck you purchased this product and want to actually play it, I suggest the following rules:

Shuffle the cards and deal an equal amount to each player, using all the cards (if an even amount of players, leave one card out).
Pick a player to start.
The player who starts plays a card, stating which value the game will score (power, toughness, Attak or Energy).
The player who played the card with the highest value for that statistic wins all the cards played that turn. They go into his ‘pirates booty’ pile.
The player who played the lowest value leads the next turn.
The game continues in this way until no player has any cards left.
Once the game ends each players adds up the value of their ‘pirates booty’ by summing the ‘casting costs’ of all cards then won.
The winner is the player with the highest booty.

As for the face in lower left (Mario or Peach), they can be safely ignored. And if you’re wondering if my rules are strangely familiar, then yes I’ve repurposed this bootleg product as Mario Top Trumps! Enjoy playing 🙂

A Game For Men

May 21, 2025

Australia is famous for the ferocity of its fauna, and therefore it’s not at all surprising that yesterday I came upon this:

Yes my friends, this is Animal Kaiser Plus: The King of Animals. This is nothing less than an IC card game based around animals fighting to the death! I sat on the tiny and suspiciously close to the ground seats and could hardly throw my $2.80 in fast enough to give it a play.

An ‘IC card’ game refers to a game using physical cards that are read/scanned by the machine during play. These are very popular in Japan and this is my first time seeing one in English. If you don’t have a card to scan you are giving a default player character, which for me was Leo, The Lion Cub.

The ‘gameplay’ consists of pushing one button to get a random number (between 10 and 50) which – if higher than the opponent – leads to an attack. It’s so simple even a child – a toddler – could do it and it’s obviously no major challenge for a venerable gamer like myself.

So when my Leo, The Lion Cub was repeatedly beaten senseless by the ‘Teck’ attacks of an Asiatic Black Bear I suspected this ‘playing without a card’ business was a handicap.

Happily the game vends a card every game, and after humiliating ursine defeat I received my first card. I hurriedly fed in more credits and purchased two more cards: and thus my team was complete:

Philistines may say it was pure luck I happened to get exactly one animal, one ‘strong’ and one ‘miracle’ card in three rolls – thus providing one card for each team category – but those heathens don’t understand my level of gaming skill.

Those Philistines also wouldn’t begin to observe that this game is a simplified reskin of Japanese arcade classics such as Mushiking or the various Ultraman or Kamen Rider games I often play in Japan. I’m intrigued the system has ‘gone west’, albeit in a non-licensed form.

And so I unleashed my empowered Black Panther upon the animal kingdom, and his righteous fury made mince meat of a bear and a Goblin Shark before he was in turn blown back by the juggernaut of all beasts: an elephant.

It’s perhaps fitting the game then provided me a Goblin Shark of my very own – with evocative attacks including ‘Kande Burst’ and ‘Sledge Gauer’ – although my lethargy by now was absolute and I had to tear myself away from Animal Kaiser Plus: The King Of Beasts without seeing how the shark fared. What other fabulous cards were waiting inside?

Even if I never see this game again, I’ll remember it forever.

Robot Claw