Its not just the photos, Calbee's promotions also suck

 

(Cracks knuckles) OK, sorry, I know I've been doing a lot of complaining about Japanese card sets as of late but I have a bit more to do.  We had some disappointment at our house this week which I'd like to talk about. 

Over the course of this year's baseball season, I've been collecting the Calbee set one bag at a time with my two kids.  Its been fun, though their enthusiasm sort of waned a bit as the season went on.

This week though I think it finally fell off a cliff.

One irritating thing about Calbee sets these days that I hadn't ever really paid much attention to before is that the "Lucky Cards" are insanely hard to pull.  My son got one in June from a bag of Series 1 which made him very excited.  I thought that was really cool, but we blew threw dozens and dozens of bags of Series 2 Chips without hitting one.  The guys who rip open cases of them suggest that the Lucky Cards are seeded  at a rate of about 1 per 150 bags.  Which is kind of weird given that the prizes you get (like a crummy plastic album that only holds 48 cards) aren't exactly valuable. 

My son however really wanted a Series 2 Lucky card because the promotion said it was redeemable for a special set of cards of the team of your choice and he wanted the Dragons one.  Not having pulled one form a pack, I went on Yahoo Auctions and bought one from a re-seller for 1500 Yen.  I then sort of surreptitiously slipped it into a pack that I pretended I was opening for my son, handed it to him and let him pull it out.  

That was so great!

When you pull a Lucky Card, you have to cut out a little tab on them, glue it to a postcard and mail it to Calbee.  Then they'll send you the prize.  For Series 1 we got a crummy little album.  But we were excited for the Series 2 prize since special cards were certain to be way better than that.

So we waited a whole month and finally they arrived on Wednesday!

My son opened the envelope and out plopped......a stack of cards that was mostly regular Dragons cards from the base set which are available in packs. There were 8 cards total, 6 were just the regular Dragons cards.  Only 2 of them were from the Star Card subset with gold embossed signatures.  

"I already have these" he said in disappointment, and just dumped them on the table and walked off.

This kind of laziness on the part of the makers of Japanese baseball card sets has really been pissing me off this month.  Last week my son opened a box of 2022 Topps NPB that is so bad they more or less forgot to put anything on the card backs, and now this.  

What particularly annoys me is that Calbee used to have really great Lucky Card promotions.  The first time I tried putting a set together bag by bag was in 2004.  The Lucky Cards were way easier to pull back then, I probably bought about 100 bags that year and I ended up getting 8 Lucky Cards, so it was about a 1:12 ratio rather than a 1:150 ratio like today and you could reasonably feel a bit of excitement that these were things you could expect to pull every once in a while (as opposed to almost never now).

And the prizes you could redeem them for were actually really awesome.  This is what I got from the Series 2 Lucky Cards:

A whole boxed set of cards that were not available in packs!  24 cards in total.  

Granted that to get these you had to send in three Lucky Card tabs rather than one, but given how much easier they were to find it was still way easier to get one of these than it is to get a 2022 team set of just 8 cards, most of which are just cards from the regular base set anyway.  Also, bags of Calbee chips cost about 60 Yen each in 2004 but are about 100 Yen today.

I really think Calbee is shooting itself in the foot by cheaping out so badly on these Lucky Card promotions.  My son was so excited when he pulled that first one back in June.  If they'd have made that pay off by actually sending him something fun like a card set similar to what they did in 2004 he'd probably have kept that enthusiasm level up.  But instead he's been burned twice with a lousy album that isn't even big enough to fit the set into, and now a pile of cards that are mostly worthless doubles to him. This crap isn't how you turn kids into lifelong collectors of your product, its how you encourage them to find other things to do.  Which is probably for the best I guess.

With the season over (from the perspective of a last place Dragons fan anyway) we've got a few months off now.  I'll give the 2023 Calbees a try when Series 1 comes out, but I'm not holding out much hope that the kids will be into it like they were this year.  And I'm putting most of the blame for that on Calbee's shoulders.  

1947 JRM 30 Menkos

 

For the first time in a very long time I was able to add some new vintage menko to my collection. These cards are from the set that Engel catalogues as JRM 30 and dates to 1947.  They are identifiable mainly by the little diamond with a triple K in it, and also by the way the text is contained in curved rectangles on the sides.

Engel has catalogued twenty cards in this set, which he rates an R4 (fewer than 10 known copies of each card in existence), so its possible there are more.  As you can see, I have eight of them, including some HOFers like Shigeru Chiba and Fujio Fujimura.

One thing I like about the set is that though crude the artwork is far superior to the photography in contemporary Calbee sets.  You've got players in a variety of poses, doing a variety of things against a variety of backgrounds.  Quite refreshing compared to the monotony of all photos on modern Calbee cards being more or less carbon copies of each other.  

The people who made this set were doing so in a Japan that was economically devastated, suffering from widespread malnutrition and whose cities had just been reduced to rubble by a massive bomber campaign just two years earlier.  If they could make an interesting set in those conditions, Calbee today really has no excuses.

Anyway, the reason I haven't added many vintage menko to my collection these days is simply that the explosion in prices in the US card market has spread to Japan and I've been priced out of the market on most of the stuff that comes up on Yahoo Auctions for the past 18 months or so.  Its been frustrating because there has been a lot of stuff come up for sale that I would have been able to snap up back in 2020, but which these days easily sell for 5 times more than what they used to, sometimes more.  These ones somehow slipped through the cracks and didn't get much attention, so I was able to pay 2020 prices for them.  This might be the last addition to my menko collection for a while, barring either a complete collapse in the market or me winning a lottery (which is a particular long shot since I don't buy lottery tickets).

Also, since I mentioned Engel's guide I should mention that he recently put out a 3rd edition which I recently purchased.  If you collect vintage Japanese cards I'd say it is worth picking up the new edition, he's added a fair number of new cards to it (and if you don't have the old edition you absolutely should get it). 

2022 Topps NPB Sucks, Don't Ever Buy It

 

There is no stronger motivation to return to blogging after a couple of months hiatus than the desire to complain about something.  Fortuitously the purchase of a box of 2022 Topps NPB has provided me with a very good opportunity to validate that hypothesis.

It was my son's birthday this week and having almost completed the Calbee set this year one bag of chips at a time together I thought I'd get him a box of cards we could rip and try to put the set together in one go.  I found boxes of both Topps and BBM on Yahoo Auctions and decided to give the Topps one a try.  I picked it up almost a month ago and set it aside until the big day.

My son had fun opening the packs.  That is almost the only nice thing that I can say about this set.  I could say the same about packs of 1991 Donruss or pretty much any other set for that matter so....yeah.

This set just sucks so bad I don't know where to start.  So I'll start with the box itself.  That is an ugly, unimaginatively designed box.  The packs inside, which I don't have a photo of handy, are even more boring to look at.  I remember what Topps boxes were like in the 80s - very colorful designs with pictures of cards of the stars on them.  They made you really want to buy the packs.  To further entice you they even made the boxes themselves out of cards, which was an ingenious idea.  

2022 Topps NPB basically looks like a carton of cigarettes sold in a country with very strict plain packaging laws.  I almost expected to see a giant warning about lung cancer with a scary picture of a damaged lung on the side.  This is just as god awful a package design as you can get.

But what about the cards themselves?  Well....

They almost exactly copied the 2022 MLB Topps design except that they didn't put the team logo where the team logo is supposed to go.  Kind of dull but not awful.  I give them points for having slightly better photography than Calbee, which is not a high standard.

The backs though just make my blood boil:

What the F is this?  Is this a joke?  This is a joke right?  Tell me this is a joke.  This can't not be a joke, so it must be a joke. 

My favorite part of the joke is where they could only fit two lines of stats (2021 and career) at the very bottom because they needed to devote the rest of the card back to....nothing!  Literally empty space with nothing but a tiny team logo taking up about 15% of it.  

This is so gratuitously awful I almost have to ask if mischievous vandals might have broken into the Topps offices and replaced whatever the real design for the card backs was with this....this....this.....this..... (voice from the guy sitting next to me as I type this: "Tomfoolery"?) TOMFOOLERY, yes, thank you.

Oh and you know what the insert cards are?  These same garbage cards but with different colored borders!  And a retro throwback subset using the 1958 Topps design, perhaps chosen because that is the dullest one that could be copied with the least amount of effort possible.  No autographed cards or anything like that of course.

This set just sucks so bad I actually feel kind of guilty about having insulted my first born child by having made a gift of these to him.  I hope one day when he is old enough to appreciate how bad these cards are that he will forgive me.  

Anyway, I guess I got what I paid for.  This set was released last month with a suggested retail price of 13,200 Yen per box.  I paid 8,000 for this one on Yahoo Auctions, and there are plenty available to be had at around that price.  Word seems to be getting around about how much these suck.  Good.  I hope this post will contribute to that.  Be forewarned: 2022 Topps NPB is the worst set of baseball cards I've seen in......I don't know how long but a while.

For Christmas, I'll be getting my son a box of 2022 BBM.