Category: Trading Cards

New Japanese TCGs (Part 1)

  • September 2, 2025

Trading card games (TCGs) are a big deal in Japan and while in the west new games seem few and far between, almost every time I visit Japan I see recently released games. Furthermore they’re very inexpensive in Japan – booster packs are usually under $2 – so I usually buy one booster of each game to check them out.

Today I’m going to open five packs and evaluate the cards. Obviously I’m not going to play the game, but often TCGs in Japan are collected more than played so here I’ll restrict myself to the quality of the cards as collectibles.

This game, based on the Detective Conan series, was released late last year and apparently has an upcoming western release. The back of the pack contained no information on card types or rarity.

There were six cards inside, and in my opinion they’re all unattractive. They seem to feature manga (as opposed to anime) art, in some cases colorized. One card is foil, but the effect is so subtle it’s almost unnoticeable:

Interestingly while they are all game cards, there are three different – and extremely basic – cardbacks. Perhaps each player has more than one deck?

The cards have the feel of a Magic or Pokémon card, which is to say they don’t feel as premium as other Japanese sets (like Battle Spirits). As a collectible product this gets a thumbs down from me, but perhaps if you are a fan of the series you may think differently?

Jellyfish Eyes is a TCG partly created by a renowned Japanese artist. Again it was released late last year, and apparently has a game system different from most other TCGs. This isn’t obvious by the cards themselves:

It looks like a cross between Pokémon and Duel Masters, and the story apparently invoices children having monster ‘friends’ they use to battle. Reading up about the artist I see he’s been heavily involved with NFTs in the past so this TCG may be a bit of a cash-in.

The pack identified six rarities including ‘secret’ and ‘parallel’. If foiling exists, none of the cards in my pack had it.

The cardback is boring, and the cards have a somewhat flimsy feel. The art did nothing for me, although I’ll concede it is at least better than most Pokémon clones. But I don’t think I’m being controversial by predicting this game wont last long.

I can’t imagine Animal Cardgame: Species War will get a western release, but these days with the rise in TCG speculation who knows? This seems to be exactly as it sounds: a game in which you use animals to battle against each other. How do they balance it so lions and orcas always win? Who knows?!?

The art is ok, but the cards are extremely wordy and the game appears to be quite complicated. Maybe this isn’t the kids product I initially assumed?

Amazingly, I got a secret rare card! There are only three in the set (of 83 cards), and as you can see the art covers the entire card. In MTG parlance, this card lets you mill 15 cards to play any creature in your hand without paying the casting cost. Other rarities include common, uncommon, rare and ‘legend’.

The cardback is boring (is that a cage?!) but I thought the art was decent and the premise seems bonkers enough that this may be fun. Also, it reminds me of this.

This is a weird one. About two decades ago a TCG called Lycee was released. It was based on various Japanese visual novels and features mostly fanart. It eventually ended but was rebooted in 2017 as Lycee Overture although new expansions have been infrequent since. This expansion – based on a bishoujo game brand I’d never heard of called ‘Navel’ – was released while I was in Japan so naturally I purchased a booster.

While I don’t play Japanese visual novels I feel I could write an entire blog post on their art styles (don’t worry, I never will) which in most cases are an acquired taste. To say the least I don’t like the art on these cards 🙂

The above is my rare card (other rarities include ‘gold signature stamped’ which is obviously stolen from Weiss) which I’ve translated. The card has six stat types (top and bottom left) and seems to have a half dozen different effects based on various conditions. Many Japanese-developed TCGs have reputations for complexity and this game seems to fit that mold!

Of all the sets I’m showing in this post this one has the best cardback, but once again the cards are a little flimsy and none of mine are foil. I assume this game knows it audience and that doesn’t include me!

Lastly today here is Force Of The Horse. This one also released while I was in Japan and I saw impressive point-of-sale displays at various stores but the packs were always sold out. Based on this I assumed the game to be something special and was happy to finally find it for sale. Costing about $5, it was by far the most expensive booster of these five.

I imagine the hurdle to attracting players to a horse-racing TCG is high and therefore I expected the cards to dazzle me. But as you can see they don’t at all! Not only is the art uninspired (look that that rain card!) but the cards themselves seem to be printed on the thinnest card stock possible and are very flimsy as a result. Plus there’s only five in the pack, which means these cost me about a dollar apiece!

This is such a weird product. Who will buy enough of this even to make a deck and what’s the chance they’ll find anyone else playing? Surely this has no future.

So there you have it. Of these five I’d say none of these have cards pretty enough to actually collect, so we can only hope the gameplay is good enough. But history suggests it won’t be, and in a few years these will be just as forgotten as the hundreds of other Japanese TCGs no-one ever plays or talks about today!

The World Of Bootleg Chinese Waifu Cards

  • August 5, 2025

I bought this a couple of weeks ago:

It’s a box of ‘Goddess Story’ cards. These are Chinese unlicensed ‘waifu’ cards featuring girls from anime and video games. Some refer to these as ‘Goddess Story TCG’ but they’re strictly for collecting only: there’s no game element.

Here’s a pack:

And here’s the five cards that were inside:

From the top left, we have characters from Love Live, Oreimo, Needy Streamer Overdose, Gundam and Demon Slayer. All the characters featured on the cards are from existing properties – 24 in total are represented in this box alone – and none of them are licensed. These cards therefore exploit the (lack of) Chinese copyright laws to use the artwork without credit or payment.

The cards are extremely high quality. They’re all glossy and well made, most of them have some type of foiling and the rarer ones are embossed and have very fancy foil effects. Even the most basic cards feel better in your hands than a Magic The Gathering card, and this quality belies the bootleg nature of this product, and is one of the reasons it’s become so popular.

There’s six levels of rarity in this box, shown above. Rare cards (the lowest rarity) are not foiled, but all the others are. The four levels about CR (SR, SSR, SER & SCR) are textured with embossing effects as well. Apparently SCR cards are very rare, and I was lucky to get even one in my box (which I haven’t finished opening). Can you identify the characters/series on the above six cards?

I first heard of these during the pandemic, and saw them available on places like Etsy about two years ago, although I felt they were overpriced at about $5 a pack. When I was in Australia earlier this year a shop at Charlestown Square was selling individual packs at A$14 each (!) which was eye-opening, so when I saw on Amazon a price of only $13 – for an entire box of 30 packs – it was time to buy in. I was so impressed I quickly purchased a few more:

Only one of these boxes cost more than $20, and it was only by a few dollars. Each of these are different sets, although the bootleg nature of the product makes it difficult to determine in what order these were released (there’s no dates and the set codes are inconsistent). Furthermore the box I have opened contains some cards not listed on the checklist at the back of the box.

At this point I’m sure some of you are shaking your heads (“He bought ten boxes?!?”) but these scratch the itch of opening trading card packs, are very cheap, and the cards are shiny and pretty! I’ll be opening these packs for years 🙂

I’ve been buying these on Amazon, and the vendors usually send bonuses with the orders. To my surprise this has included promo packs and the included cards are shown above. I like that two of these are tarot cards. Imagine the difficulty of assembling an entire deck!

And then there’s the above. It turns out other Chinese companies are releasing similar products, and I’ve bought a few of them as well to evaluate. These were a little more expensive than Goddess Story and seem to promote themselves as higher quality cards with fancier treatments (including heat-sensitivity, glow-in-the-dark and gems). As you can see I haven’t opened any of these yet; I’ll save them for a special occasion!

I’ve got over 300 packs of Goddess Story cards now. Want some? Let me know 🙂

  • Posted in Anime
  • Robert

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 🙂