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.  

Fastest Card Bubble To Burst in History

 

Well, that didn't last long!

On Monday I did a post about how the above card  of Shinjo with his name as "Big Boss" from the just released Calbee Series 2 had sold on Yahoo Auctions for a whopping 33,500 Yen (about $300 US).  This didn't make much sense to me since its just a Shinjo card and, while its a "chase" card its not a particularly rare one.

Out of curiosity I started watching other auctions for the same card.  The first two ended last night (here and here).  Exact same card, exact same condition.  How much did they sell for?

Ouch.  One copy for about $40 US, the other about $30.  So in other words the card fell to 1/10th the price it went for on Monday by Wednesday of the same week.

This is really weird.  I mean, the auctions in the 30-40$ range that ended yesterday feel a lot closer to what this card should be worth than the ridiculous 300$ auction price of just a couple days before.

I'm a bit puzzled, but I'll try to throw a theory out here to see if it sticks.  There is a kind of norm in Japan, amongst those who have lots of money, that being the first to own a new thing brings a great deal of prestige to you.  Thus the market value for being the "first" owner of something is way higher than it is for being the second owner of the exact same thing.  

The most famous example of this are the prices that are paid for the first tuna to go on sale at the Tsukiji market each  year.  In 2019 for example a single tuna sold for about 3 million US$ at Tsukiji because it was the first.  There are less dramatic examples out there too.

I wonder if the $300 Big Boss card might have only achieved that price because it was the very first copy of that card to appear on Yahoo Auctions and so some rich/vain collectors bid each other up on it in order to have braggging rights for being the first to land it.  

Edited to Add: I've been having a back and forth with Prestige Collectibles on Twitter and he pointed out that the seller on that 300$ sale earlier this week has a ridiculously low feedback rate, and also that the underbidder seems to have had his account suspended.  So this raises the likelihood that the 300$ sale was a bogus one to begin with, thus rendering a lot of what I wrote in this post moot!  

Big Boss is Commanding Big Prices

 

This is the first time in years that I've tried putting a Calbee set together bag by bag (or more accurately its the first time ever that my kids have done so).  One result of this is that I've been paying more attention to the shiny, glittery cards that Calbee puts in them  than usual.

In terms of "chase" cards, Calbee basically operates in an early 90s American cardmaker mindset.  In addition to "Lucky Cards" redeemable for prizes, the main cards people go after are basically just parrallel versions of cards from some subsets that have gold signatures embossed on them.  

All the other stuff that cardmakers in the US started doing after the early 90s - auto cards, memorabilia cards, buy-back cards, etc etc - none of these have ever been adopted by Calbee.

Series 2 of Calbee just came out and my kids and I are excited to start putting that one together (we are very close to finishing Series 1, which is kind of an impressive feat if I do say so myself).  The card that is getting the most hype in that one by far is.....a card of the manager of the team with the worst record in NPB by far, who as a player was a .254 career hitter.  

Tsuyoshi Shinjo became the Fighters' manager this year and on taking the job changed his name to "Big Boss".  Calbee gave him a card in their Star Cards subset with the name "Big Boss" and everyone thinks that is super neat here.  So much so that a copy of the gold parrallel version of that card just  sold for about $300 US on Yahoo Auctions over the weekend.

Yikes!  Its not hard to predict that once the hype fades away and there are a million other "Big Boss" cards out there, this card will not be worth anywhere near that much.  

In the meantime though I'm kind of wondering what I should do if my kids pull one of those out of a pack.  Thus far I haven't really been trying to get them to pay attention to the condition of the cards too much since that sort of grown-up anal retentiveness can really kill the fun of collecting for young kids.  But at the same time....300$ is 300$ so maybe I'll slip that one into a card saver if they get it.

Major Excitement at My House Last Night

Had some major excitement at my house last night.  I brought home three bags of Calbee baseball chips from work.  The kids and I have been putting the set together bag by bag this year which has been great fun.  One thing that I have discovered  in the process is that putting a set of Calbee cards together that way is made massively easier if you have three mouths to eat the chips rather than just one.   I've tried putting sets together on my own a few times in the past and it always ended up with my house overflowing with bags of potato chips that I just couldn't eat because there were too many of them.  We've actually got about 3/4 of the base set put together now, which is pretty good.

The excitement of opening bags has been waning recently though as we inevitably are getting mostly doubles now.  But there was one thing that was keeping our enthusiasm up - the chase for a Lucky Card.

As I've written about on here before, Lucky Cards are cards that you can redeem for prizes.  This year's Lucky Card will get you a card album, which is an extremely enticing prize for a seven or four year old kid.  They've been wanting one of these ever since we opened the first bag but so far we've been out of luck.

Until last night that is.  After dinner and after my son did his homework, I gave him one of the bags to open.  He opened up the cards and immediately started bouncing off the walls screaming "I got a Lucky Card!!!!!!" in excitement.  Seeing a kid get a card he really wanted like that is an impressive thing to behold.  It reminded me of my own childhood when I'd get a Don Mattingly in a pack.  I had my camera handy so I snapped some pictures of his moment of victory.

So this morning I stopped off at the post office to buy a pre-paid postcard.  We have to cut out a tab on the Lucky Card, glue it to the postcard and mail it to Calbee, and within a month they say they'll have our card album at the door.  That is so great since it means the excitement of the chase for a Lucky Card is now replaced by the excitement of the wait for a package to arrive in the mail.  He'll be checking that mailbox every day when he comes home from school for the next few weeks until the day it arrives.

This makes me really psyched about Calbee Series 2, which should be hitting the stores later this month and will mean a whole new chance to chase the Lucky Card in that one for whatever prize they'll be giving out that time.  

Best Card Collecting Week Ever

 

Being the father of two young kids has meant that most of my collecting since they were born has been done at night after they go to bed.  A little over a week ago I was going through my 1975-76-77 Calbee monster set one night in the living room after getting the kids to bed when my son came down to get a drink of water.  He came over and seemed really interested in my cards, asking me a lot of questions about them.  We have watched a couple of games on TV together and played catch at the park a few times so he is starting to get interested in baseball for the first time this year.  I asked him if he wanted to start a baseball card collection and he got very excited.  I gave him his drink of water, sent him back to bed, then started planning how to make that work.  

I decided that the best way to go about it was to get some bags of this year`s Calbee baseball chips, even though I had just posted on here less than two weeks ago that I was giving them up.  So I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work the next day and picked up three bags (one for my son, one for his little sister and one for me).  

I arrived home, asked `Who wants to start a baseball card collection?` and got an extremely enthusiastic response from both kids.  We sat down on the carpet, opened the three bags up and two new collectors were initiated into the world of baseball cards.  

Its a lot of fun getting your kids into baseball cards.  They liked them so much that every day for the past week they`ve asked me to get more and every day I`ve been happy to oblige. They have built up a nice little pile, so I got them an album to put them in and printed out a checklist from Calbee`s website which they eagerly check each time they open a new pack. 

We`ve been eating a lot of chips this week.  Since I had a pile of 1991 OPC Premier that I wasn`t doing much with I also gave those to them.  My son and I sat down and marked the checklist card with each one we had (all but 3 to complete the set) which was fun too, but the Calbees are getting a lot more traction since we can see the players on them on TV while we watch games.

Its really fun collecting with kids. I imagine in a while they`ll move on to other interests, as kids always do, but I`m going to enjoy it while it lasts. Hopefully we`ll be able to put the set together bag by bag as the season progresses, something I haven`t ever been able to do.  The old fashioned way is the best way.  

I'm Giving Up on New Calbee Sets

 

I'm a bit late with this annual traditional post, but bags of 2022 Calbee chips are now in stores and I bought my first bag a couple of weeks ago.  I scored regular cards of Tomoya Mori and Ryouga Tomiyama, pictured here.

Since buying that bag I've had these two cards sitting on my desk next to my computer.  They've been staring at me for a while now and each time I look at them I feel a distinct lack of motivation to get any more.

For the past few years I've been in the habit of buying complete sets of the regular Calbee cards by series from resellers on Yahoo Auctions (see for example these posts from 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021). Its just way cheaper that way compared to trying to piece the sets together bag by bag.

The repetitive nature of the card design though has finally driven me to give up on that habit and I've decided I won't be doing the same thing this year.  The sets are just too boring to bother with anymore.

I've complained a lot about the predictable and boring photography on Calbee sets in recent years, but its really the card design that is making me quit.  The fronts of Calbee cards haven't really changed much in 25 years (starting with the 1997 set), with only minor fiddling on the margins (such as switching from Roman letters to kanji to write player names from year to year).  I don't really mind that too much, since its a clean and simple design which I like (bland photography notwithstanding), but what I find more irritating is that they stopped changing the design on the backs of the regular cards as well.  

This is a more recent development but has been going on for a while too.  The current back design has been in use since 2010 with only very slight changes from year to year.  Prior to that between 1997 (when they first started using color backs with player photos) and 2009 the back designs went through a few different iterations which, while none were really fantastic it at least allowed you to distinguish the sets by year simply by looking at the backs (though the 2007-2009 sets all have similar back designs which make this a bit difficult).

But since then?  If you pick up any Calbee regular card printed in the last 12 years its almost impossible to tell which year it is from just by looking at the design of the card itself, front or back.  So you've got a 12 year print run of more or less identical cards. This is laziness on a scale without historical precedent I think.  

This also makes it very hard to develop any sort of attachment to these cards.  I've been collecting long enough that there are some card designs which stir memories in me just by looking at them.  Like if I see a 1990 Donruss card it immediately takes me back to ripping open packs of those as a 14 year old back in 1990.  Or the backs of the 2004 Calbee set remind me of going to the supermarket near our old apartment to buy bags of those as I tried to put the set together.  And so on and so forth.

When you lose those distinguishing features that allow you to put a set design to a year, and thus a time in your own life that you might think back fondly of, you lose a lot of what gives those cards some of their emotional appeal.  

So instead of adding another generic block of uninspired cards to the unending pile of monotonous crap that Calbee has been producing since 2010 I've decided to give it a miss this year. And next year.  And all the years until Calbee puts out a set worth collecting again.

In the meantime I'll be focusing my efforts mainly on older Calbee sets which I'm still quite fond of.