Were the first Pokémon cards Carddass cards?
The first Pokémon cards the public could buy were not game cards at all. They came from Carddass vending machines in Japan in September 1996, weeks before Media Factory published the Pokémon Trading Card Game on October 20. The Carddass set and the card game are different productions by different companies, Bandai against Media Factory, and only one of them was ever exported. The TCG conquered the world; the cards that came first stayed in Japan, which is why the answer surprises English speaking collectors.
THE SEPTEMBER SET
309 cards, red and greenThe first Carddass release, Parts 1 and 2, appeared in September and October 1996. It holds 309 cards: all 151 Pokémon in both a red and a green version, echoing the two Game Boy games, plus two checklist cards and a Town Map card. The fronts carry Ken Sugimori's artwork under the words MONSTERS COLLECTION; the backs print each monster's data beside its Game Boy sprite, the Carddass information idea applied to a bestiary. Some backs even record the games' trading system, marking version exclusive monsters as exchanged from the other version.
Twenty four of the cards are prism cards, the first holofoil Pokémon cards released to the public, twelve designs in red and green versions. In a detail no game card ever repeated, the prism Carddass cards are stickers that can be peeled from their card stock. Parts 3 and 4 followed in April and June 1997 with a full redesign, sixteen prisms and a single rainbow foil Mew, and the anime based sets ran on to 2000.
THE TOPSUN CLAIM, ANSWERED
Why the rival claim failsThe one rival often named for first Pokémon card is the Topsun card line. The documented chronology answers it: Topsun did not obtain the rights to Pokémon until 1997, so its cards cannot precede a September 1996 release, and the dated sequence runs Carddass in September 1996, the trading card game in October 1996, and Topsun in March 1997. Only the Carddass Parts 1 and 2 sit ahead of the game; the 1997 Carddass parts do not, and this page claims the first place for the September set alone.
The deeper point is the shape of 1996. Pokémon cards did not begin as a game that later added collecting. They began, in a vending machine, as collecting itself: pictures and data of 151 monsters, in two colors, a month before anyone could play a hand. The game arrived second, and the game is the one the world remembers.