Sunday, August 2, 2020

The Most Valuable Card is a Lucky One


This is the most valuable card by far that you can get in packs of 2020 Calbee Series 2.    It is a "Lucky Card".  

Calbee Lucky Cards have been around for a while.  Back in 2004 I tried putting the Calbee set together the old fashioned way: buying lots of bags of chips.  I didn't get anywhere near to finishing it (and 16 years later I am still short), but one thing I did get that year was a few lucky cards.  In 2004 you had to collect three of them, then cut the tabs off the top of them and glue them to a postcard which you would mail to Calbee.  In exchange, Calbee would send you a pretty cool boxed set of "Star Cards" featuring gold embossed signatures on them.  There were 3 of those boxed sets for each series and I was able to get the first two, but fell one Lucky Card short of being able to get the Series 3 one.  

It was fun though, slowly accumulating them over the course of the summer, then sending the envelope off and waiting by the mailbox until my sets arrived.

The Lucky Cards work roughly the same way this year, when you get one you cut the green tab off the upper left hand corner of the back, glue it to a postcard and mail it in.  In fact, the card looks almost identical to the ones I remember pulling back in 2004, with the colors changed a bit.  

This year instead of collecting three you just have to get one.  But also instead of getting a box set you just get two cards out of a 24 card set featuring various stars ("Kira Cards"), so there is a bit of a tradeoff there.  You would need at least 12 of these cards to finish that set.  You are allowed to designate which of the 24 cards you want, so you don't receive random cards and can avoid getting doubles, though they actually ask you to nominate two alternative card choices in case they run out of certain players, so it isn't guaranteed that you will receive the ones you want. 

Back in 2004 there wasn't much of an online market for Japanese cards so I had no idea how much they were worth.  But these things are really "Hot" on Yahoo Auctions, I've been following auctions of them and they always sell for over 3,000 Yen each (about 30$ US).  The photos I'm using here come from an auction that just ended at 3400 Yen.  There are dozens of them up at any given time and they don't seem to be having trouble finding buyers.  

At that price, factoring in shipping and also the cost of sending the postcards, you'd be looking at spending about 43,000 Yen (430$ US) to complete that 24 card set.  Which is way too much for me to be interested.

Happily though this also explains why I can buy complete base sets of Calbee for  900 Yen including shipping.   The Calbee case breakers basically make all their money off the Lucky Cards and everything else is just leftovers.  

I've bought a few bags of Calbee chips this year despite having purchased the base sets, in part just to see if I could land a Lucky Card, but I've come up empty so far.  I'd like to land one just so I can mail in the postcard and wait by the mailbox for the cards to come.  Actually, that is another thing that makes 2020 much different from 2004.  Back in 2004 getting baseball cards in the mail was a huge novelty since I didn't have a Yahoo Auctions or even Ebay account back then and made all my purchases in person at stores.  Now I get cards in the mail all the time so the novelty value is kind of lost.  But it would be cool nonetheless.

Incidentally another interesting thing about these cards is that they are ticking time bombs.  They expire on March 31, 2021 after which they can no longer be redeemed and basically become worthless.  Yahoo Auctions has a ton of 2020 Lucky Cards being bid on like crazy, but any remaining Lucky Cards from 2019 or earlier are basically worthless and very few sellers even bother to list them for sale.  I still have my two unredeemed 2004 Calbee Lucky Cards sitting around somewhere, I held onto them for sentimental reasons!

12 comments:

  1. Lucky cards have been an ongoing curiosity for me for years. Are there different ones? How do you get the binders or the "limited edition" box sets?

    I thought the gold facsimile signature "Star" cards were just randomly inserted into packs.

    I've seen boxes containing a complete series of Calbee cards with facsimile signature from around 1999 to 2001-ish. Were these available via Lucky card redemption?

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    1. All the Lucky cards in a given year are the same, but the stuff you get in return changes from year to year. Some of them have kind of sucked (can't remember but some years the redemption has just been for one of those albums that aren't very useful), but most of them have been for cards of some sort.

      And yes, those boxed sets with the facsimile signatures from around 1999-2001 (like this one: https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/p702951771 ) were redeemed with Lucky Cards.

      I'm not sure how many Lucky Cards you needed for those 1999-2001 sets since those were pretty big 72 card sets. In 2004 I had to send in 3 Lucky Cards for a boxed set that only had 24 cards (a parrallel of the Star Cards insert set rather than the regular set).

      The boxed sets sell fairly cheaply now, usually around 3-4000 Yen each for the 1999-2001 era ones, and the 2004 ones I know fetch about 1000-1500 Yen each. Which is why I'm surprised by the insane prices for Lucky cards this year, since it'll cost about 43,000 Yen to complete a 24 card set that will maybe be selling for 2,000 Yen 10 years from now!

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    2. So the current "limited edition box sets" Calbee's been doing the past few years - like for Series Two there's 12 card set called "Wins Leaders" - how do you get these if it isn't through the Lucky Cards?

      I was curious what the Lucky Card giveaway was for Series One since there weren't any Star cards with that set - turns out it was a binder! So it's by Series!

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    3. Those limited edition box sets aren't from Lucky Cards, they are sold through only through Amazon as sets.

      Oh and you are right, I mispoke about that. The cards are different from Series to Series. Back in 2004 it was different though, you could use the tabs interchangeably from Series to Series, I remember that I used a leftover Series 1 Lucky card tab I had to redeem my Series 2 set that year. I guess they stopped that, reading the rules just now it doesn't mention anything about being able to use the tabs interchangeably like that.

      The Series 1 binders do suck as a redemption prize.

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  2. Cool promotion by Calbee. I wonder how many "lucky" cards they produce compared to the regular cards. I'm surprised they're worthless after they expire, since I personally would still want one for my set if I were building it. That being said... I still will pick up expired Topps redemption cards whenever they're cheap.

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    1. Oh I can answer that! One guy a couple of years ago opened 2500 packs to see what he got (which is weirder than it sounds, remember that means he bought 2500 bags of potato chips!). He only got 16 Lucky Cards out of those, so that is roughly 1 Lucky card per 156 packs.

      They were nowhere near that rare back in 2004 when I tried to put the set together one bag at a time. I pulled 8 Lucky Cards that year out of probably 100 or so bags of chips that I bought!

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    2. Holy cow. Did he mention what he did with all of those chips?

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    3. Actually yes, he gave them to a friend who owns a restaurant, who served them as a side dish!

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  3. Yeah, what Fuji said. Don't you need these to complete the set?

    Also, I assume that the SP set that I've got (like Ichiro here: https://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1978568&postcount=276) were the prizes associated with winner cards in 1999?

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    1. Yes, the SP set that year was redeemed through Lucky Cards, you needed to get 5 of them that year (so they were probably a lot easier to pull than they are this year).

      I guess if you are going for a master set or something you would need one, but its a bit like saying you don't have a complete 1986 Topps set unless you have those "Win a Trip to Spring Training" cards they used to put in packs, so I don't think most collectors care!

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  4. I really wish I would have paid more attention while living in Japan to snag me some Calbee cards and sumo boxes. Wasn’t into cards back then. Wondering if I would have been one of those guys who tries to complete the entire set by hand, or bag.

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    1. Yeah, its pretty awesome. It took me a couple years of living here before I got into the cards and I remember regretting not getting into them sooner!

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