hey, did you know that houshin engi has official trading cards? no? well now you do. and you'll know far more by the time i'm done here

bandai, the toy company, makes a line of card gacha machines called "carddass". you put your money in and the machine spits out either a single card or a pack of cards. which cards you get is, of course, completely random. wikipedia says the name carddass is based on the AMeDAS, or "Automated Meterological Data Acquisition System", which is a system used in japan to gather weather data. the idea is apparently that the cards are supposed to be data gathered by kids. tragically i don't think the 'carddass' name retains quite the same oomph in english.

carddass cards are still being made today, with lines for popular media properties like one piece, dragon ball, jujutsu kaisen, uma musume, twisted wonderland, hololive, and many many others. the official website is here, but it only has information on the card lines currently being sold, and doesn't have any archival data on past series. if you know japanese and want to poke around, you can browse wayback machine captures of their old website here, as far back as 2000.

from what i can tell, there are two different subtypes of carddass card. at the time the houshin engi cards were released, they seem to have been called "carddass masters" and "carddass hyper battle", but from the looks of the current website these names have been changed to "data carddass" and just "carddass". carddass masters/data carddass are purely collectible cards. hyper battle carddass are card games and can be played in decks.

in conjuction with the release of the senkaiden anime, houshin engi got cards from both lines! below you'll find links to pages that talk about each more in-depth. eventually i'd like to scan in all of my cards and upload images of them as well, but that's a big project that i keep putting off because i'm lazy. please imagine it in your hearts, though. doesn't it look beautiful