Unconnected Marketeers/Ability Cards

Ability Cards are the gimmick of this game. New cards can be bought at the end of Stages 1 to 6, and a card associated with each stage's boss can be bought right after beating them. Upon playing for the first time, the player can only equip one Ability Card, but clearing the game raises this limit to two and unlocks the Blank Card. Clearing the game after buying this specific card on Stage 5 unlocks hidden endings for each playable character and raises the equip limit to a maximum of three. There are four types of Ability Cards in total.

Item Cards
Item Cards grant resources: lives, spell cards, Power, money. The cards Spell Card, Money Comes and Goes On its Own and Ringo-Brand Dango are always free in order to guarantee an additional card at the end of a stage even when lacking money. These cards can be bought several times and therefore do not show up on the bottom-right of the HUD, with the exception of Phoenix's Tail. Item Cards cannot be equipped by default.

Equipment Cards
Equipment Cards are equivalent to assists. Typically, they are less powerful shot types added to the player's main shot. They are based on the powers of other characters in the series, with a third of them being based directly on abilities of this game's playable cast. Most of them deal damage, but Annoying UFO and Ancient Magatama are defensive. Back Door is a little defensive and a little offensive. Equipment Cards are always active.

Passive Cards
Passive Cards give various benefits without needing to be activated. They are the most present in the game and are meant to improve your runs. Passive Cards can help with resource collection, evading deaths, improving your overall strength and shopping for cards.

Active Cards
Active Cards serve similar gameplay functions to Passive Cards, but unlike these (as well as Equipment or Item Cards), they need to be manually activated with C to work. They have cooldowns instead of being active at all times. For this reason, they tend to be more powerful or to be usable quite often. The amount of owned Active Cards is not limited and the player can switch between them at will with D.