Japanese Baseball Cards: Game Cards

Showing posts with label Game Cards. Show all posts

Saturday, September 14, 2024

Giants SGA Cards

I was looking around on Ebay the other day and I came across a listing for what looked like a reprint of an old Calbee card, specifically a Sadaharu Oh card, #1005 from the 1975/76/77 "monster" set:

The front and the back of the card indicated it was a 2024 release but I didn't know what it was. The wrapper implied that was some sort of tie-in with the Giants and the writing on the packs translated to "Old Summer Series" and "Calbee Professional Baseball Chips Special Reprint Card".

My first thought was that Calbee was doing some sort of Giants OB team set along the lines of the Hawks set they had done last winter (although the Hawks set had active, not OB players in it). But there was no listing for this set on Calbee's website. My next thought was that maybe this was something the Giants were selling in the team shop but I couldn't find anything in their on-line store. I reached out to Sean, who I consider the most knowledgable blogger about all things Calbee, but he didn't know anything about them either.

Finally it occurred to me that I should look to see if these were involved with some sort of giveaway at Tokyo Dome and, after going through the Giants' News section on their web page, I found the answer - this was one of 12 cards that were given away during a three game series against the Carp from August 6th to the 8th. The series was dubbed the "Old Summer Series" and the intent was to highlight players who had played for the Giants at Korakuen Stadium, the team's home until Tokyo Dome opened in 1988. The other cards in the set were for Shigeo Nagashima, Suguru Egawa, Takashi Nishimoto, Masumi Kuwata, Tadashi Matsumoto, Kazumasa Kohno, Tatsunori Hara, Kiyoshi Nakahata, Kazunori Shinozuka, Sadaaki Yoshimura and Warren Cromartie.

I had remembered having seen some reprints of Calbee Giants cards on Ebay before but I had always kind of assumed that they were some how tied into the 50th Anniversary reprinted cards from 2022. What I discovered when I did a search for "オールドサマーシリーズ" ("Old Summer Series") on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and Mercari is that apparently the Giants and Calbee have been doing this at least since 2022. I'm not entirely sure but there were at least three cards in 2022 and four in 2023. There also appear to be facsimile signature parallels that are fairly rare.

While working my way through the list of new articles about the Giants, I came across another game where cards were given away to attendees. The Wednesday, August 21st game - again against the Carp - was "Professional Baseball Game Dream Order DAY". Fan were given one of twelve different Dream Order collectible card game cards:

The cards were a tie-in with the team celebrating their 90th season and apparently represent the winners of a "Best 9" lineup voted on by the fans (I think). The twelve players are Masaki Saitoh (starting pitcher), Tetsuya Yamaguchi (middle relief), Koji Uehara (closer), Shinnosuke Abe (catcher), Sadaharu Oh (1st base), Kazunori Shinozuka (2nd base), Shigeo Nagashima (3rd base), Hayato Sakamoto (shortstop), Hideki Matsui (outfield), Yoshinobu Takahashi (outfield), Warren Cromartie (outfield) and Tatsunori Hara (manager). (NOTE - you get 12 players for a "Best 9" by adding a middle reliever, a closer and a manager.

I'd be curious to find out how many SGA Dream Order cards there were this year. What I know of is this. the Marines giving away a card of Kazuya Fukuura in July (H/T Deanna) and the Eagles giving away cards of Takahiro Norimoto and Hideto Asamura in May. I should probably do some spelunking through YJA and see what's there but I haven't had a chance to.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Mail Day From Jason

I wanted to do a quick post about the latest cards I got in the mail the other day from my friend Jason, who sells Japanese cards on Ebay as "JK's Card Shoppe".

First up is the complete "1st Bowman" subset from last year's Bowman NPB set. I make fun of Topps' NPB product for what I think are good reasons and I really make fun of the "1st Bowman" cards but I couldn't resist getting all 48 cards for a really reasonable price. If you recall, the "1st Bowman" cards in the Bowman sets have all been cards of ikusei players, usually from that year's rookie class (so the guys in the subset from the 2023 Bowman set were mostly guys taken in the development player portion of the 2022 draft).

There's some odd aspects of this. For one, by the time the 2023 Bowman set was released in early November, there were nine players with "1st Bowman" cards who were no longer ikusei - they had been added to their team's 70 man rosters. Several of these players had cards showing them as non-ikusei players in sets from BBM and Epoch that had been published before the Bowman set was released. It was a weird choice for Topps to still have them as development players.

My favorite thing, of course, is that Swallows player Yukihiro Iwata has "1st Bowman" cards in both the 2021 and 2022 sets.

So with all that said, why did I want the subset? Basically it comes down to wanting cards of as many players as possible for any given season, so while I think it's kind of silly for Bowman to try to make a big deal out of the "1st Bowman" cards, there's no other 2023 cards of these players. Well, there are, as most of them are in the 2023 BBM Rookie Edition set but I'm thinking more of cards showing the players in action. Although even then, some of these cards feature photos of the players from their team's introductory press conference (similar to the photos that Rookie Edition uses) or are just a mugshot of the player. So I wanted the cards but I knew there was some room for improvement with them.

OK, after all that, let's see some cards. Rather than show all 48 cards, I'm just going to show three cards of players who were no longer ikusei by the time the set came out:

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-19

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-8

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-25

If you look closely at the player's uniform numbers, you'll see something kind of interesting. Both Matsuyama and Noguchi have three digit numbers (211 for Matsuyama and 121 for Noguchi) which are standard for ikusei players but Chano's wearing a two digit number (61) indicating that he's on the 70 man roster. So Bowman knew he wasn't a development player anymore (he'd been put on the 70 man roster in March) but put him in the "1st Bowman" subset anyway. (To be fair, there's nothing that actually says that the "1st Bowman" cards are exclusively ikusei players.)

OK, enough whining about the Bowman cards. I complain a lot about cards I keep buying, don't I? Let's move on. I picked up cards of a couple of my favorite players from Epoch's Premier Edition team sets from last year:

2023 Epoch Carp Premier Edition #29

2023 Epoch Carp Premier Edition #07

2023 Epoch Swallows Premier Edition #08

2023 Epoch Swallows Premier Edition #22

Jason had recently picked up a couple boxes of Bushiroad's Dream Order Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 cards and I picked up 15 cards from what he had available. I'm not a big fan of these cards but I wanted some examples from the set. I picked up a handful of player cards:

#PBP02-M11 Yudai Fujioka

#PBP02-H12 Yuki Yanagita

#PBP02-F11 Daiki Asama

#PBP02-L09 Shota Hiranuma

#PBP02-L11 Junichiro Kishii

I picked up ten of the "Tactics" cards which I like more than the player cards. Not only do they have better photos but they all have a horizontal format which is a nice change of pace. My only complaint about the cards is that they don't identify the players:

#PDO-05 Takashi Ogino

#PDO-05 Yuki Yanagita (I think)

#PDO-04 Akira Nakamura

#PDO-06 Akira Nakamura

#PDO-01 ?

#PDO-08 Takahida Ikeda

#PDO-05 Junichiro Kishi

#PDO-06 Takeya Nakamura

#PDO-06 Takero Okajima

#PDO-07 Hiroto Kubokata

That was all the cards that I knew I was getting from Jason but, as usual, he threw in some extras. He gave me a couple more player cards from the Dream Order box - two of them were parallels:

#PBP02-H03 Kohei Arihara

#PBP02-04 Yushi Shimizu

#PBP02-E09 Kengo Horiuchi

If it's not obvious, the Shimizu and Horiuchi cards are parallels.

He also threw in this card which I think is used for game play but I don't know anything about it:

Jason threw in a "New Face" insert card from the 2000 BBM set:

2000 BBM #NF-4

There were a couple Calbee cards from the last couple years:

2023 Calbee #L-5 Tomotaka Sakaguchi

2023 Calbee #T-06 Hiroaki Shimauchi

2024 Calbee #T-13 Yuma Tongu

The most unexpected card of what he included was this card from the 2022 SCC KBO Rainbow set:

2022 SCC KBO Rainbow #SCC-22/L03

I haven't gotten any KBO card since 2021 so it was a nice surprise.

Thanks for the cards, Jason!

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Some Updates And Genesis

I wanted to do a quick post about a new set announcement and some updates about previously announced sets.

- The new set announcement was for Genesis, BBM's annual high end set. As usual the base set contains 120 cards - ten per team which splits up as nine player cards and a team checklist. Also as usual, no one really cares about the base set as the attraction of Genesis is the autograph and memorabilia cards available in the boxes. The different varieties are too numerous to list but there are booklets, super patches, ball autographs and multiplayer autographed memorabilia cards. There's also a myriad of parallel versions of all the base cards and five "High-grade insert card" sets - Elite Of Nine, Game Changer, "Rookie Limited Insert", Cross Earth and Combo Cross Foil Signing. The set will be released in late September.

- Calbee Series Two was scheduled to be released "in late June" but I haven't seen any evidence that it has come out yet (although there are four more days in the month). The official announcement on Calbee's website hasn't changed but I've seen two different things saying the set won't be released until late July. The first was Jambalaya's front page where they list upcoming releases while the second was this tweet I saw this morning. (On the other hand I saw several other tweets implying the set would be out on the 27th so we'll see what happens.)

- Vol. 2 of the Central and Pacific League Booster Packs for Bushiroad's Dream Order collectible card game will be released this weekend. I hadn't realized that Bushiroad had put checklists for all Booster Pack set on their website and I was confused for a moment when it listed 228 cards for all of them when I thought that the Vol. 1 sets were more like 108. Their listings contain all the parallel versions of the cards - for example the Orix Buffaloes checklist for the Vol. 1 set has four separate Tomoya Mori cards listed - all with the same card number - which is why the numbers are so high. UPDATE - forgot to mention that the website mentions that Vol. 3 of the Booster Packs will be released on August 24th with Vol. 4 scheduled for October 12th. No checklists for those sets yet though.

Saturday, June 8, 2024

2024 Bushiroad Dream Order Cards

Dream Order cards are the latest collectible card game for NPB. Produced by the company Bushiroad, the initial sets were published back in late April. There were basically fourteen sets issued at that time - a starter deck for each of the twelve NPB teams along with a "booster pack" set for each league. The starter decks contain twelve unique player cards along with a bunch of other cards used for game play. The "booster pack" sets contain another twelve player cards for each team. A player may appear in both the starter deck AND the "booster pack" set but they are distinct cards with different photos and card numbers. The "booster pack" sets also contain six "Tactics" cards per team that have an action photo of an unidentified player on the team (although it's pretty easy to figure out who it is). As the name implies, the "booster pack" sets are sold in packs of eight cards. The booster packs were labeled "Vol. 1" so I guess there's an underlying assumption there that there will be updates as the season goes on.

I'm not a big fan of collectible card game cards so while I was curious about these, I didn't plan on trying to build a complete set or anything. I ended up buying the Lions starter deck and a "booster pack" for each league. The starter deck was 1500 yen and I think the booster packs were 500 yen a piece but I could be misremembering.

I was kind of surprised when I opened up the starter deck. The box included a game board and detailed instructions on how to play the game (all in Japanese of course) which I had more or less expected but what I didn't expect was the number of cards in the deck - there's 48 in all! I had mentioned earlier that there were "twelve unique player cards" in the deck - I said it that way because there's three identical copies of each player card in the deck. The rest of the cards in the deck are split between six (five unique) "Tactics" cards (that do not have photos on them) , a "team" card and five identical "time" cards showing the team logo. I assume these cards are used somehow in game play but I have not learned how the game is played. Here's a photo of the contents of the box:

The first card in each team starter deck is a foil card with the player's name in gold embossed text. For the Lions deck, that player is Sosuke Genda. Here's his card along with a couple other cards from the deck:

#PSD05-L01 (Sosuke Genda)

#PSD05-L07 (Shuta Tonosaki)

#PSD05-L08 (Takuya Nakamura)

#PDO-04 "Infield Caution" Tactics

#TIME-L01

#TEAM-L01

All the cards in both the starter deck and the "booster packs" have the same backside:

Each "booster pack" contains eight cards. There are five base set cards, two parallel cards and one "Tactics" card. The parallel cards are both foil with one of them being a little fancier than the other - I'm sure there's some technical term for it but I don't know what it is. Here are the contents of the Central League pack:

#CBP01-T11 (Seiya Kinami)

#CBP01-C10 (Ryosuke Kikuchi)

#CBP01-S07 (Masanori Ishikawa)

#CBP01-DB10 (Yamato)

#CBP01-G11 (Takayuki Kajitani)

#CBP01-G06 (Yuto Akihiro)

#CBP01-C11 (Shota Suekane)

#PD0-03 "Full Swing" Tactic (Keita Sano)

And here are the cards from the Pacific League pack:

#PBP01-T12 (Taiga Hirasawa)

#PBP01-H09 (Yuki Tsumori)

#PBP01-B10 (Koji Ohshiro)

#PBP01-L10 (Ryusei Satoh)

#PBP01-E12 (Hiroaki Shimauchi)

#PBP01-L05 (Tatsushi Masuda)

#PBP01-F08 (Naoya Ishikawa)

#PDO-05 "Outfield Caution" Tactic (Takuya Hiruma)

The photography on the player cards is decent and I especially liked the photos on the Tactic cards. Enough so that I bought a couple at Mint Urawa, gambling that I hadn't gotten them in the pack I bought (since I didn't open the packs until I got home):

#PD0-03 "Full Swing" Tactic (Jose Osuna)

#PD0-05 "Outfield Caution" Tactic (Yuki Okabayashi)

There seems to be a big marketing push on this set. I think almost all of the Mint stores were carrying these cards (with the possible exception of Mint Hakata) and I saw them for sale at gaming stores that I passed by but didn't stop at. There was basically a billboard for the cards on two sides of the building directly across the street from the Akihabara Radio Hall building that houses Mint Akihabara:

There was a promotion going on with the Eagles the day I went up to Sendai. There was a stand selling the cards outside the ballpark:

The first pitch ceremony of the game was thrown by the "Dream Order Producer" - Nobuto Kobayashi:

The best part of it all is on the way into the ballpark, I was given a Takahiro Norimoto card:

I think they were also giving away Hideto Asamura cards. As far as I can tell, this is a promo card with no equivalent card in any of the Dream Order sets so far - Norimoto has a card in the Pacific League "booster pack" set but it doesn't look like this.