EDIT: The High School Warfare Shinji Hirako card below is a Chinese bootleg, thanks to Tumblr sleuthing. No clue if it's cut artwork or just commissioned to go with the OG artwork to fill out a pack. See below for updates to the post!
I was MYSTIFIED when I happened to stumble across this on eBay, because I totally loved the initial High School Warfare and read the visual novel when it came out initially (only in Japanese, sorry!) and SHINJI WAS NOT EVER A PART OF IT THAT I REMEMBER.
So, here. High quality 600dpi scans of possibly the rarest Shinji official art I've ever seen, because I can't even FIND this again with google lens (or on any Japanese art sites like pixiv that I haunt). This fricking artwork is just not on the internet.
But wait, you say. How do we know this is official card art?
Well, there's others in this series that I can find:
The foil on Shinji's card doesn't show up well on the scan, but it's absolutely the same gold foil/print quality as these others. So it seems to be professionally printed, not fanmade?
I am mystified why he got cut from the original lineup of characters. Did I miss something? Am I going insane? He definitely wasn't in the OG webfic, right?
Also, if you look at the numbering, Shinji is BL01-PR09, and we know who 3 through 6 are here. So I'm wondering who 1, 2, 7, and 8 are... probably Uryuu, Gin, Yumichika, and Kensei, since they were originally in the webfic.
I can't believe they cut Shinji. Can you imagine him as the homeroom teacher to these delinquents? PEAK CINEMA. @pinguwuuuu @whitefoxfiction @darthwhorecrux
EDIT: Leaving my original post so you can see all my wrong assumptions in their terrible glory. Please check out the sleuthing done here: https://www.tumblr.com/688199/779736798763122688/i-found-the-source-of-the-card?source=share by the lovely 688199!
So, I've shared this on the reblog of their sleuthing, but also wanted to stick this here since this post is getting so much traction: I made two errors on this that embarrass me.
First, there was no copyright mark on it. Bleach official stuff sticks their copyright on eeeeeeverything. However, the art used on all the other cards I could find matched the Klub Outside stuff I own from the High School Warfare, and it was a picture of Shinji I'd never seen before (so hell yes I bought it lol).
Second, there's a kanji character on the card at the bottom of the card (right above the "Student Card") that is 旧字体, or "old-form" (i.e. the original Chinese kanji instead of the modern simplified form that Japanese people use today, 新字体 "new form").
Why on earth didn't I catch that?
Er, well, my degrees are in pre-modern history of Japan and Japanese... and I am way too used to reading early 20th century stuff for some translating purposes, especially now that I no longer live in Hokkaido. So I just looked at that, went "yeah, makes sense to me" and totally fluffed that it wouldn't be used that way on a modern card. DUH. Mea culpa.
You can see the original art used on the cards here in the actual webnovel:
Shinji looks close enough to the style/shading/color that I could honestly believe he just wasn't used (especially with Kensei having OG art), but that's not proof this was ever official, hence the updates/edits. I don't wanna spread misinformation, there's enough of that crap already on the internet.
Only two things I disagree with in that linked sleuthing post:
1., Shinji's bangs have absolutely been drawn flaring out past or overlapping his longer hair, generally when he's in motion, and the hair length has varied from mid cheekbones to brushing the jawline in Kubo's own drawings as he developed his artstyle:
And two, even though the anime/manga translators took the original kappa joke and turned it into "haha Shinji has a bowl cut" that is NAWWWWWT a bowl cut. I've ranted on Shinji's hair previously.
This is a bowl cut - i.e., you slap a bowl on someone's head and cut around it.
Shinji has a bob with bangs:
ANYWAY. It's not official perhaps (and definitely not an official card!), but it is scrumptious new artwork. Mystery solved, thank you Tumblr!
