Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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It was, in a shameless embracing of cliche, a dark and stormy night.

Somewhere on an island, a girl with the power to conjure explosives out of thin air breaks into a fortress in a bid to steal a suitcase full of playing cards. She accidentally opens the briefcase, and the cards—themselves, imbued with a strange power—scatter to the winds. A man makes a phonecall; ‘Assemble High Card’ is the order.

This is how HIGH CARD begins, and incredibly, that opening few minutes of notably taut worldbuilding are just one of several such runs throughout the episode. A month later, in a non-specific North American city (it’s basically New York), a blonde huckster named Finn (Gen Satou) cons a rich man out of his watch with a complicated confidence trick involving an escaped dog and a hot dog stand. Don’t worry; he’s doing it to help keep an orphanage open. Actually selling it—or any of the other bits and bobs he’s conned off of various suckers—is another story, and the one thing he has that isn’t stolen and is genuinely worth a lot isn’t something he’s willing to part with: a 2 of Spades playing card, with a bullet hole design through the top pip.

Inspired by the card, he hits “Bell Land”, a not-Las Vegas of similarly ill repute, and hits up a casino. An initial lucky run hits a brick wall when Finn encounters an apparent fellow swindler, a middle aged man with the rather silly name of Lucky Lunchman (Shigeru Chiba). Lunchman’s own luck runs out when the casino becomes suspicious of his winning streak, but an attempted shakedown in a false “VIP room” takes a turn for the decidedly surreal, and it is here that HIGH CARD reveals its hand in full.

It’s obvious throughout much of what precedes that there is something going on with these, essentially, magic playing cards. Finn and Lunchman both have them, but it’s not until we meet a third card user (“Player” in the show’s own parlance) in the VIP room that things really get gnarly.

It rapidly becomes clear that the story that Finn and Lunchman have stumbled into is not, as is the case with writer Homura Kawamoto‘s previous best-known work Kakegurui, a series focused on gambling. Instead, it is a straight-ahead action anime that ticks two of the three blood, money, and romance boxes pretty damn hard this early on. The VIP room turns into a bloodbath as the third Player reveals himself; the man can turn anything to marbles. Including people. You can see where this is going, and things quickly dissolve into a horrific bloodbath that Finn and Lunchman are caught in the middle of. Lunchman does not make it out of all of this alive, Finn does, through the indirect help of a fourth Player, Chris Redgrave (Toshiki Masuda), who distracts the man with the marble card long enough for Finn to A) swipe Lunchman’s card off of him after the former stole it and B) make his escape, a mad dash out the casino doors that concludes with him hijacking an expensive sports car. If you suspect that all of this concludes with a chase sequence, a tense standoff where the marble card Player bites it after seemingly killing Chris, who is himself, shocker, actually still alive, you’re totally correct. Also! We find out what Finn’s card does; it gives him a magic gun.

At the conclusion of these 22 or so minutes, you are left with possibly the single most unhinged stretch of anime of the young year thus far. Whether or not it’s “any good” is going to depend on how strongly you prioritize a sense of sheer fun; I think this thing is fantastic, and it easily stands alongside other strong premieres from this season like Buddy Daddies, and I suspect it, that anime, and the Trigun reboot will form a sort of trifecta of fun, colorful action anime to round out the Winter ’23 season. Where all of this will go is of course an open question this early on, but it’s hard to go too wrong with a colorful cast of prettyboys with superpowers.

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