a wing of the museum · 工房
浮世の工房 — the masters & the press
Every card in this house was drawn by a real hand and printed by a real machine. This wing tells both halves: seven plates for the master artists behind the games we carry — their lives, their creeds, their lines — and three for the industrial press that folds an approved illustration into a sealed booster. We're a card shop, not scholars: the shaky claims are marked as shaky, the quotes were verified against their sources before we hung them (translations say so), and where the industry keeps its doors shut we report the shut door instead of guessing what's behind it.
yonin no te — The Four Hands
In Edo Japan, a woodblock print was never one artist's work. The Metropolitan Museum puts it plainly: "each print required the collaboration of four experts: the designer, the engraver, the printer, and the publisher." The publisher — 版元, hanmoto — planned the venture, financed it, chose the subject; the artist — 絵師, eshi — drew; the carver — 彫師, horishi — cut the blocks; the printer — 摺師, surishi — laid the colours. Of the three craft hands, only the designer signed the sheet; carver and printer went unnamed beside the publisher's seal. The result, in the Library of Congress's words, was "an art that was both populist… and highly sophisticated" — by conventional account some two hundred impressions a day, a sheet for about the price of a bowl of soba, and collected hungrily: around 1810, Shikitei Sanba wrote children into his bathhouse comedy Ukiyoburo trading actor prints and arguing over their quality. We have found no scholar who draws the line from that workshop to a booster pack, so take the parallel as this house's own reading, offered in the open: a trading card is popular art — publisher-commissioned, artist-signed, industrially printed, cheaply sold, hungrily collected. The four roles never disbanded. They re-hired.
第一部 · 絵師
part one — the masters
Toriyama Akira — Entertainment, Through & Through
Akira Toriyama (1955–2024) came to manga sideways: born in Kiyosu, outside Nagoya, he spent about three years designing posters at an ad agency, quit at 23, debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1978 — and always credited those agency years for a working habit of never missing a deadline. Dr. Slump made his name; Dragon Ball (1984–95, 519 chapters, a publisher-estimated 260 million copies) made an era, alongside his character designs for Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger. His creed was entertainment without apology — "The role of my manga is to be a work of entertainment through and through," he told the Asahi Shimbun in a rare 2013 interview (AP's translation). The cards came early: Bandai's Carddass machines launched in 1988, and by Bandai's own count some 1.5 billion Dragon Ball cards had sold by 1995 — but Toriyama did not draw them. Bandai's Carddass developer has described waiting with Jump's editors for his rough storyboards, then carrying copies to Toei Animation, whose artists drew the card art. No official source credits him as a card illustrator in the modern game either; his hand is upstream — the characters and the world are his, rendered by the workshop. Fusion World launched in February 2024. On 1 March he died, aged 68, of an acute subdural hematoma — announced on 8 March by his studio, works still in the middle of creation, the funeral already held privately. The announcement asked for quiet, and offerings were declined.
Oda Eiichirō — One Reader, Aged Fifteen
Eiichiro Oda (b. 1975, Kumamoto) earned a place in Shueisha's Tezuka Award at seventeen, served the classic Jump apprenticeship — including under Nobuhiro Watsuki on Rurouni Kenshin — and began One Piece in 1997. Guinness first certified it in 2015 under the exact title "Most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author"; by 2022 the count had passed 500 million copies worldwide. His philosophy is reader-first to the point of self-portraiture: "I have only one reader in my mind — myself as a 15-year-old," he told VIZ in 2012, mixing action, comedy and tears because "more than anybody, I would get bored." The famous three-hours-of-sleep lore is his own remark in a 2016 promotional paper, surviving in fan translation — self-description, not verified biography. After the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes he backed his home prefecture's recovery; bronze Straw Hats now stand across it. The One Piece Card Game arrived for the series' 25th anniversary — announced March 2022, Japan that July, English that December — with a commemorative illustration from Oda and a joke, per ANN's translation, that he doesn't know much about card games. The cards, his staff account explained, carry art "from the manga, anime, and also other illustrators"; the double copyright line on every card reflects those two licensed streams, manga and anime (our reading of it). Whether Oda approves individual cards is not publicly recorded — his documented guard-dog supervision is of the Netflix adaptation — so we leave his role at the licence, where the record leaves it.
Takahashi Kazuki — You Can't Play Alone
Kazuki Takahashi (1961–2022) worked some fifteen years in near-obscurity before Yu-Gi-Oh! began in 1996 — not as a card-game manga but, in his own framing, a school drama: "Yu-Gi-Oh feels like a manga about a card game, but at its heart it is really a school drama" (as translated by Nippon.com). The card game inside the story — widely described as a nod to Magic: The Gathering, though we find no surviving statement of his own on that — was one game among many until readers made it the engine. Konami built it for real in 1999; by 2011 it was the Guinness-certified best-selling trading card game, over 25.1 billion cards. Takahashi never stopped drawing for the physical game — his card and promo art fills the artbook Duel Art, and in 2005 he sketched and signed a one-of-one card for a Make-A-Wish teenager. His creed was the table itself: "The thing about the card game is that you can't play by yourself. You have to play with friends" (TIME For Kids, 2002, surviving in fan reproduction). His death holds two layers, and we keep them apart as the record does. Officially: found on 6 July 2022 in the sea off Nago, Okinawa; drowning; no foul play. Three months later, Stars and Stripes reported — on a US Army major's account, which the Japan Coast Guard declined to confirm — that he had entered the water during a rip-current rescue of a girl, her mother and a soldier. "He's a hero," the major said. Attributed, not asserted — the way this house already holds it in the duel of souls.
Sugimori Ken · Nishida Atsuko — The Silhouette & the Squirrel
Ken Sugimori (b. 1966) found Satoshi Tajiri's photocopied games zine Game Freak in a dōjinshi shop and became its illustrator; in 1989 the zine incorporated. The first 151 Pokémon were a team's work — six or seven designers, Atsuko Nishida and Motofumi Fujiwara among them — with Sugimori refining and redrawing most of them into one watercolour hand. Recognisability was an engineering constraint before it was a doctrine: Game Boy sprites, he has said in fan-translated interviews, had to read at a glance; a decade later he was still designing Hydreigon so its silhouette "still looks like lots of heads." Nishida drew Pikachu. Her first sketch, she told the Yomiuri Shimbun in 2018, was a daifuku-like thing with ears; asked to make it cuter she turned to squirrels — "At that time, I was really into squirrels" (Kotaku's translation) — puffed the cheeks, and bent the tail into lightning. When the card game launched in October 1996 (developed by Creatures Inc., published by Media Factory), the credits named four hands: Mitsuhiro Arita, Sugimori, CG artist Keiji Kinebuchi — and Tomoaki Imakuni, for exactly one card, Porygon. Nishida followed within the year through the earliest promo cards, and has never really left: in February 2026 her Pikachu Illustratorpromo sold for a record $16.49 million — the most ever paid for a Pokémon card.
Arita Mitsuhiro — What Is This Creature?
Mitsuhiro Arita (b. 1970, Fukuoka) is self-taught — he studied electronics and software, not art — and his first professional job, at the prototype stage in 1996, became the longest tenure in card illustration: the game's original Energy symbols (seven by his own count, Colorless included), the Base Set Charizard and Pikachu, and by his own archive more than 600 cards since. No one theorises the tiny frame better. "One thing I always try to focus on in my illustrations is to think about what that Pokémon is," he told Pokémon's official profile — observing "reality and nature… as if they could be realistic creatures." In Japanese he says he composes for カードになった時に一番効果的な絵面 — the picture that works best once it becomes a card (JDN, 2019; our translation) — and insists the creature carry its own will, 意思. Roughs on paper by preference, finish digital; an official card takes roughly seven weeks to two months, with approvals at every stage. Around the Pokémon work sit a hundred Culdcept cards, eleven years of Final Fantasy XI, concept design for the Berserk films — and, in 2024, a first Magic: The Gathering card, approached the only way he knows: "What kind of Mitsuhiro Arita artwork would I want to see in MTG?" Thirty years in, he is still at the table — guest of honour at Japan Expo Paris in July 2026.
Watanabe Kenji · Itō Akira — Born for the Frame
Two designers whose creatures were born for the game object itself. Kenji Watanabe joined the toy-planner WiZ straight out of design school; when WiZ and Bandai set out to build a Tamagotchi that could fight, he became the Digital Monster's principal designer (1997) and has remained its hand since. The look was deliberately American-comics — 「それこそ当初はアメコミを意識していましたから」, "from the very start, we had American comics in mind" (Bandai interview, 2018; our translation) — Spawn, Simon Bisley and Mike Mignola among the touchstones he has cited. His pipeline ran illustration-first: finished art was handed over for conversion to coarse LCD pixels, and the heavy black shading he adopted partly to save time hardened into the franchise signature — one that now lives natively on cards, where fan databases credit him with over 150 Digimon Card Game illustrations. His own word for his role is medium-like — an itako, channeling a team. Akira Itou inverted the manga-first pipeline he trained in: assistant to Kazuki Takahashi, then Yu-Gi-Oh! R (2004–08), then co-creator — with game designer Satoshi Nakamura and Bushiroad's Takaaki Kidani — of Cardfight!! Vanguard, whose manga (November 2010), anime (January 2011) and first decks (February 2011) launched as one coordinated birth: the manga artist inside the founding design team, his name printed on cards in the game itself.
na o kizamu te — The Names on the Card Face
The One Piece Card Game prints its illustrators' names on the card face — and then no official database remembers them. The ledger is community-kept: a Japanese fan directory tracks over 200 credited hands; Limitless keeps per-printing records; our own wall hangs 59 named hands from the credits our catalogue carries. The credited card face has made guest mangaka an institution: one 2025 Shonen Jump issue carried a Luffy by Black Clover's Yuki Tabata (our wall holds it), an Ace by Shun Saeki, a Sabo by Posuka Demizu; Jujutsu Kaisen's Gege Akutami drew all Five Elders for a 2025 booster; Boichi an Ace promo in 2023 — roughly two dozen professional mangaka so far, per the fan count. The credit feeds an economy: the manga-art Luffy alternate was called the game's most expensive card by CGC in 2024, selling ungraded above $3,000, counterfeits circulating; specialist hands like Kankurou and Sunohara list the game on public multi-TCG client rosters; one credited hand is a company, Studio Vigor Co., Ltd. What the printed credit means for an illustrator's pay, no named outlet has yet recorded — the interview record is thin, and we say so rather than fill it in.
第二部 · 工房
part two — the press
hatchū to kanshū — The Order & the Approval
How does a card get commissioned? The public record is asymmetric — nearly all of it Pokémon. Creatures Inc., the card game's developer, plans each card's concept, prepares reference, chooses the illustrator and issues the order: the creature, often a place or theme, and "sometimes," Arita says, "a specific pose or attack in mind." The art then moves rough → line → colour — "each of those three steps has its own check and approval process" — seven weeks to two months in all, across a roster one 2019 interview put at around eighty illustrators. Drafts are reviewed by both Creatures and the Pokémon Company side; documented feedback runs as fine as head proportions and how dark a piece will print, correcting wherever an artist's reading drifts from official standards. The Illustration Contest is the one public window — its 2024 rules even publish the judging split: 40% theme, 30% originality, 30% design. Everything else must be read through the rights line. Bandai's card division built the One Piece game over two years "with the cooperation of Eiichiro Oda"; the supervision loops with Shueisha and Toei Animation sit behind the copyright line on every card, described in public by no one — an inference, and we mark it as one. Konami draws Yu-Gi-Oh! substantially in-house and prints no artist credit at all; fans petition for names. The finding is the opacity itself: outside Pokémon, no publisher opens its order book.
suri to haku — Ink, Foil, Blade
A trading card is a laminated paper sandwich built around an opaque core — patents describe two-ply bases under opaque coatings, and black-core board that defeats a backlight; that engineered darkness is why a sealed pack can be trusted at all. Cards are printed CMYK offset on large sheets, typically 100 to 121 cards: "The most normal sheet size is eleven cards by eleven cards," Magic's head designer Mark Rosewater explains — and since most sheets repeat cards, rarity is literally geometry. Foil is physics: a master hologram's micro-embossed diffraction pattern, replicated in cured resin, metallised with aluminium and applied as hot-stamping foil (US patent 5,948,199 walks the whole line); the sculpted texture on special-art rares is, per collectors' accounts, embossing that follows the artwork — no publisher documents it. The blade explains the errors collectors prize: miscuts when the cut misses register, square corners when a card skips the rounding dies, crimps when one slips into the pack-sealer's jaws. And who prints? English Pokémon: Millennium Print Group of North Carolina, a partner since 2015 that The Pokémon Company International agreed to buy in 2022 and which signed one of the biggest US industrial leases of 2025 — 1.27 million square feet of card factory. Magic: Cartamundi of Turnhout, Belgium, since Alpha in 1993. Japan? Nothing public. Toppan has marketed trading-card manufacturing since 1999 — platemaking in Itabashi, printing in Kawaguchi, finishing in Sakado — and names no client; neither Bandai nor Konami names a plant. The scale is not in doubt: 9.1 billion Pokémon cards in fiscal 2021 alone; 25.1 billion Yu-Gi-Oh! cards cumulative by 2011.
fū — The Sealing
Last comes the question the whole workshop was hired to answer: which cards share a pack. Collation is an engineered, sold service — Toppan advertises "precise pull rate control aligned with our customers' sales strategies" — packs assembled from guaranteed slots by rarity, odds set by sheet and machine. God packs — a whole pack of parallels — are collation artifacts seeded into Japanese One Piece premium boosters; Bandai's pages never say the word, the community's odds estimates diverge wildly, and whether they exist in English product is contested — our own odds room records verified JP and EN variants while some retailers call them Japan-only; both positions stay on the record. In 2026 Toppan even announced light-shielding pillow packaging to defeat pack-searchers — the opaque core's last mile. Disclosure is asymmetric by publisher: Wizards, Legend Story Studios and Fantasy Flight publish odds, Bushiroad publishes guarantees, and Bandai, The Pokémon Company, Konami and Ravensburger publish none — our own audit, kept live in the odds room. Then film, box, case, sea freight. Two centuries ago Sanba wrote children into a bathhouse, trading actor prints and judging their quality; the pull is older than the pack. The workshop of the floating world never closed. It learned to seal itself in foil.
A card shop writing about living and recently departed artists owes its receipts. Every quotation above was checked against the source named here before publication; quotes that reach English through translation — official, journalistic, or fan — are marked in the text, and the Japanese original is always the authority. The deceased are described only by officially announced fact, with later reporting attributed to who reported it. If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll mend it.
No artwork is reproduced here — the only pictures we hang are the cards themselves, in the gallery and on the artists' wall. The line these masters draw from is traced in The Lineage of the Line; what the sealed pack feels like to open is at The Pull & the Pause; the odds the collation machines set are said out loud in the odds room.
The workshop never closed; it learned to seal itself in foil.