What is Carddass? An introduction to the series

Bandai's legendary Carddass vending machines that would present the customer with a card upon the insertion of a 20 yen coin (and later 5 cards for 100) was first introduced in July of 1988 (the first of these cards would be for the iconic series "Saint Seiya"). The Dragon Ball Carddass series started in November of 1988. They were the first of their kind. The Dragon Ball Carddass cards grew to become some of the most popular and beloved collectible cards in Japan for an entire generation. They were also very popular internationally in many parts of the world.

In 2018 Bandai celebrated the 30th anniversary of Carddass

By late 1997 Bandai stopped the original series of Carddass, just about a decade after they first launched. A few years ago Bandai resumed production of the series starting with the revival of Dragon Ball that started with the 2013 movie "Dragon Ball Z Battle of the Gods" (ドラゴンボールZ 神と神), although now sold in boxes instead of via machines.

Although it is often believed that the name (カードダス) was originally given because of how these function: a card coming out of the vending machine (or カード出す), turns out this isn't the case.

The term Carddass borrows the "dasu" (ダス) from "Amedasu" (アメダス) which is the "Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System". The reason being that Bandai was hoping children would gather around, discuss, and spread information about these cards.

There were also other ways of obtaining Carddass cards. Some small individual retailers or shops would sometimes sell complete sets of a series, as well as individual sales of cards (usually displayed in binders), a wonderful way for completing collections (or acquiring the prism cards directly!).

The four classic Carddass card series are:

- Carddass (also known as the main series) (30 parts +2 Remake parts, 6 prism cards per part, 10 per "Remake" part)

- Super Battle (20 parts +1 (Tokubetsudan*), 2 hidden prism cards, 2 double prism cards**, and 2 prism cards per part)

- Visual Adventure (8 parts, 6 prism cards per part)

- Super Barcode Wars & Characters Collection (6 parts, 6 prism cards per part)

*Tokubetsudan is both Super Battle part 21 and Carddass part 31, and has 9 prisms

**with the exception of part 1 and 2 which had 4 prism cards and no double prism cards

 

There were also various lines of Jumbo Carddass cards, which were extra large cards. The prism variety were sold individually in sealed sleeves, and retained the style and designs of the Carddass and Super Battle series.

Bandai did continue using the Carddass name on other series later on, but the "classic", or "golden age" Carddass refers to the series mentioned above.

There already exists incredible sites documenting Carddass cards. One such site is DBZ Collection a wonderful French site that collects an enormous database displaying full series of cards numbered and all.

For prism fans my recommendation is RetroballZ, they have great displays of all the prism cards in each collection. They even have pages in English as well!

 

Example of an Amada PP (pull pack)

The biggest rival Dragon Ball card producing company was Amada (although other companies, such as Banpresto tried as well). Instead of Carddass, Amada had PP's, or Pull Packs. Their distribution system differed from Bandai as they sold them in card packs (as pictured above). One would pull a paper sleeve and get the card for 20 yen, or one could buy the entire pack guaranteeing prisms.

There were many types of Amada Pull Packs, but the mainline was by far the biggest "PP" series (32 parts), the "Hero Collection" (4 parts) was their second most popular collection. Aside from those they did many single part collections such as the glorious "Trading Collect - Memorial Collection", best known for having 4 amazing 3D holo cards.

Collectors often refered to these as Carddass as well. Officially of course Carddass cards were only the ones by Bandai. Whatever one may call them, Amada's cards are equally beloved and for a while were more or less equally prominent and remain extremely popular among Dragon Ball card collectors.

Very quickly Amada also started selling their cards in many other ways, including some with additional products such as storage cases or accessories. The most notable alternative releases were the clear bags with a set number of prisms displayed openly, allowing buyers to know what they were getting. 

They also pioneered so called Deluxe versions of their prisms, usually offering their cards in very nice special prism patterns (or "card type" prisms), most prominently the fixed angular diamond prism type often referred to as "hard prisms".

No one had as many variants and prism styles as Amada, and they were always very cool. The PP collection also had the most design changes of any collection, giving the different parts a lot of personality.

Banpresto's Terebi Denwa part 3 was another nice series of cards

Dragon Ball cards were so popular in the 90's that it was rare to find boys who didn't at least know of them. It was very common to see card exchanges going on during school breaks and lots of discussions around them. Everyone had their favorite series, their favorite cards, and they would regularly show off their beloved cards to their friends and family with great joy. That was the magic of Dragon Ball cards!

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