I Bought the 2024 Epoch Regular Set for 2/3 of a Penny

 

Last Sunday I bought the 2024 Epoch regular set for .68 of a cent.

This was the result of a little game I decided to play on Yahoo Auctions.  The cottage industry of case breakers looking for autographs or other chase cards in Japan has created a massive surplus of regular cards that they routinely dump on the market.  

Until 2021 I used to buy each year's Calbee sets series by series from them (in 2022 I introduced Calbee cards to my kids and went back to building sets the old fashioned way: one bag of chips at a time) and I also sometimes buy leftover unopened packs that don't have hit cards from them.  I had never really looked for sets other than Calbees though and it occurred to me that this was an oversight on my part that might be worth remedying. 

So I set myself a mission: Find the best sets for the most insane prices I could get from these guys.

I ended up buying a few for peanuts from different sellers.  The first arrived in the mail last night: a regular set of 2024 Epoch regular cards that I got for 1 Yen!

That is pretty insane, less than 1 cent at current exchange rates.  What makes it more remarkable is that it wasn't an auction with a 1 Yen start bid that I just happened to luck out on - this was a Buy it Now price!  The guy was basically just giving them away.

Unlike Ebay, sellers on Yahoo Auctions can't inflate shipping costs to offset low prices so I paid the actual shipping cost of 230 Yen (about $1.50 US).

In other words the cost of shipping was 230 times more than the cost of the cards themselves, an odd ratio.

The seller promptly packed them up nicely and got them in the mail and within 2 days the package was on my sofa getting ripped open.

As you can note from the photos there are a few gold and silver parrallels mixed in there, which is kind of neat.  

Dave did a really good review of this set on his blog last year so I won't say much about it other than that I like the design of the cards and the player selection (one of the things that made me want to get it) but agree with him about being disappointed with the smaller set size (which is getting worse year by year with most card makers here). 

I realized as I went through them that this isn't quite a complete set, it is about a dozen short (this isn't a complaint, the seller never described it as a full set).  For 1 yen though how could I resist?  

1990 Calbees

I picked up a lot of 1990 Calbees last month. That set was issued in four series and has the odd distinction (along with the 1980 Calbee set, as Nippon Baseball Retro recently noted on his excellent blog) of being one of the few sets where all of the cards are not the same size. The first series are mini sized (about 1950 Bowman size for American collectors), but series 2 and up were all larger (slightly smaller than standard card size).  

I completed the first series a few years back but hardly had any from the upper series so when I saw this lot of them (all from series 2 and 3) going cheaply I decided to pounce. The above is what the upper series cards look like, the first series cards on the other hand look like this:

The lot gives me a good start, more than half of the cards in those two series. I had my first series cards in an album already so I added these to it, which creates a neat contrast between card #55 and #56 at the top of the page.

The design of the cards is almost identical to the more well known 1991 set (which features Hideo Nomo’s rookie card). One odd detail which I can’t figure out is that the back designs are slightly different from card to card. Some of them have solid black horizontal lines running across the top and bottom, others don’t. Cards #85 and 86 for example:

The rest of the cards from series 2 and 3 shouldn’t be too hard to track down, but the fourth series (which mostly has gold bordered cards which I discussed in my previous post) is pretty hard to find and a bit more expensive.

This set is now on my "actively collecting" list.  

1980s Gold Bordered Calbees

 

This is a cool card from the 1983 Calbee set that I recently picked up.  It shows Carp star Sachio Kinugasa celebrating his 2000th career hit and I just couldn't resist.  

It is notable for the gold borders which distinguish it from the full bleed photos used on most Calbee cards and I thought I'd devote a post to those 80s Calbees with the gold borders here because they are something you come across from time to time.  Some of them are extremely rare and valuable, others are just as common as any other card.

The gold bordered Calbee cards of the 1980s were issued in series in the regular sets (they are not parallels or any form of chase card) and are kind of the predecessor to today's Calbee subsets featuring things like title holders (league leaders) or season highlights (like Kinugasa getting #2000).  

Calbee only issued them in five years - 1983, 1985, 1987,  1988 and 1989.  In each of those years the gold bordered series are the highest numbers in the set, indicating that they were issued at season's end and their rarity (for most but not all years) is probably due to the same reason high numbered cards from 1960s Topps sets are harder to find - kids were losing interest in baseball at the end of the seasons so fewer were sold.  

If you ever buy a pile of random 1980s Calbee cards and find some gold bordered cards in them there is a 99.99% likelihood that they come from the 1987 set.  The gold bordered cards in that year's set are basically "commons" - they weren't short printed and are about as easy to find as any other card in the set.  I'm not sure why they are an outlier like this, but it seems kids kept buying cards late into the season that year!

In contrast if you luck out and get one from the 1983, 1985 or 1988 sets then you've got something worth a bit more on your hands, because all the gold bordered cards were in short printed series in those years and command a premium.  

For the 1983 set there are two kinds of gold bordered cards.  My Kinugasa (#675) is from the last series in the regular set (not entirely certain of the range, but cards in the high 600s)).  These are short-printed but not hyper-short printed so while hard to find they aren't crazy expensive (my Kinugasa set me back about 10$).  There are however 10 cards (5 each of Tatsunori Hara and Osamu Higashio) which are extremely rare and cost hundreds of dollars each.  These don't have numbers on the backs so they are easy to distinguish from the rest.  

For the 1985 set the gold bordered cards are numbered in the upper 400s (not sure but I think from about card #410 onwards or so).  These are all quite hard to find and expensive (starting price for the cheapest is about 5000 Yen for mid to lower grade cards on Yahoo Auctions and they go up from there).  I don't have any of them from that year and am not sure I'll ever even try hunting those down.

The 1989 set I'm actually not too sure about, the final series of them (391 and up) I think had gold borders but I've never seen one so I'm not sure.  This is sort of the rarest series Calbee issued during the 1980s and its almost impossible to find copies of them at all (SCM back when it was publishing wouldn't estimate prices for them since they were so rare).  

For the 1988 set they are cards numbered 306 to 329 and like the 1985s they are quite rare and fairly expensive. I have two cards from that series, including this Hatsuhiko Tsuji that I picked up just a few weeks ago:

These gold bordered cards are kind of a thorn in the side of us set collectors since most of them are so damn expensive.  I've completed the 1987s (along with the entire set that year!) but other than that I only have three from the 1983 set and two from the 1988 set and I have to make some tough decisions.  I'm almost finished with the 1988 set except for the gold bordered cards, and there are only 24 of them so I might make a stab at tracking those down, but budget constraints (I keep my card budget under 10,000 Yen (about $70) per month these days) are going to limit that.

One intriguing question I have is what happened in 1986?  Between 1983 and 1989 Calbee issued these every year except 1984 and 1986.  In 1984 though they did issue similar subsets, but the design of the cards that year was different and they decided not to put gold borders on them.  The 1986 Calbee set therefore stands out as the one year in that range where they didn't put out a gold bordered series at the end of the year.  Perhaps not coincidentally the 1986 set is also the smallest (250 cards) by far in that time frame, which makes me wonder if they just weren't selling as many cards?

Anyway, they are kind of a neat aspect to the 80s sets.

Edited to add: I forgot to mention that the 1990 set also has a gold bordered series!  This was after they swtiched mid-season away from the 1980s mini-card size to something closer to the present size so it is the only year where you  have non-mini cards with gold borders.  They are also a rare series worth a fair bit.  

Closet Finds: A Box full of 1976 Yamakatsu Cards

 

I found a really cool thing that I forgot I even owned this weekend, which is one of the fun things about being an absent-minded, poorly organized collector.

I did a major clean up of our spare room over the weekend. Its mostly my kids' play room which means it is full of toys randomly strewn all about, but the closet is where I keep most of my card collection and it goes through these weird cycles of disorganization which go something like:

1) I find a few spare hours to haul everything out (boxes, binders, etc) and try to organize it in a sane way.  

2) Years go by in which I slowly accumulate new cards and, instead of integrating them with the existing way of organization, I just randomly throw them into whatever box or container I have handy (my supply of 400/800 card boxes ran out long ago so I use shoeboxes, etc) and just shove it onto whatever space I can find.

3) Eventually the chaos that ensues becomes too much for me to bear and I go back to step 1.

Anyway, while I was doing the major clean up I stumbled across the above cardboard box that I had no memory of and thought to myself "I wonder whats in there?"

I opened it up and discovered this:

A fairly sizeable horde (50 cards) of the big 1976 Yamakatsu cards! What an unexpected pleasure!

The top of the box still had a shipping label on it addressed to me and I kind of remembered (based on the date) that I had bought these off of Yahoo Auctions more than a year ago.  I was extremely busy with work/family commitments at the time they arrived so I didn't get a chance to open them up and appreciate them.  Instead I just shoved them in the closet intending to do so when I had the time and ended up forgetting they were even there until this week.

In addition to the cards the lot came with 7 new albums, which are pretty cool and I think I'll actually use them.

The 1976 Yamakatsu set is absolutely fantastic.  Actually I shouldn't call it a "set" as Engel actually lists three seperate sets.  I think my cards come from more than one of these (actually mathematically they have to, the largest set is 29 cards and I have more than that.  I haven't had time to figure out exactly which ones I have from which set, the cards aren't numbered or anything which makes it quite difficult).

The photographs are quite cool on most of them and being so big they make for great display pieces.  Its quite fun to sit on a carpet in a room surrounded by children's toys and, after clearing some space, laying them out like this.

Anyway, this was a kind of nice win for my weekend.  Do any of you collectors have similar stories of finding really cool things in your collection that you had forgotten you even owned?

1989 Mermaid Data Cards

I picked up a lot of 1989 Mermaid Data Cards on Yahoo Auctions last week. Dave wrote a post about this set a few years ago which piqued my interest (and he gave me a card from the set on one of his visits here) but until now I haven't found any in the wild. They seem to be a bit hard to come by.

They are a 50 card set and Dave had wondered in his post if they might have been issued in two series since he only had cards numbered in the first 25. On flipping through mine I discovered I had about an even mix of cards from the first and second half of the set. On looking at the backs though I noticed something that might lend credence to the two series theory.

The cards on the left in the above photo are from 1 to 25. The cards on the right are all from 26 to 50. Not sure if this is significant, but the reversed color scheme is noticeable. 

I've got about half the set now, though a few have dinged corners. I'll add this to my list of kind of fun, random sets I'm working on, the colorful borders have drawn me in.

2025 Calbee First Bag

 

I bought my first bag of 2025 Calbee baseball chips yesterday after what felt like the longest wait ever.

Actually, it didn't just feel like the longest wait, it was the longest wait.  For reasons that are only known to Calbee they postponed the release of this year's set until May 5th.  

I've been buying these things for over twenty years now and this is the first time I can remember then not scheduling the release date to roughly coincide with the start of the season in late March or early April.   In 2023 I had a lot of trouble finding bags in stores in April but that was because Japan's WBC win made them sell out, not because they hadn't been released yet.

I have to say that I absolutely hate the May release date and hope it is a one off thing.  It makes no sense - the first month of the season is when fans are at their "I want to buy baseball cards now" peak.  April for those in the baseball card business should be like December for those in the toy business.  

Anyway, the set is pretty much the same as last year, which isn't saying much.  A pathetic 60 regular player cards just isn't anywhere near enough.  The checklists which normally are the only cards that have interesting photos on them this year have cheaply animated images of team mascots on them.  

On the plus side the Title Holder subset has a much nicer design this year than in recent years. But that is about the only nice thing I can say.  This is what I got from my first bag:

Baystars mascot and Dragons infielder Kaito Muramatsu - who was hitting about .140 this year before going on the DL.  Not an exciting player to be devoting a full 20% of the Dragons cards in this set to and providing the perfect illustration of how frustrating these stupid 60 card sets are.

The backs of the cards feature a remarkable innovation - they moved the card number from the top upper right corner of the card to the bottom left of it.  This is about as radical a change as you can expect at Calbee these days.

I think all this laziness and descending quality of Calbee cards is probably the result of them trying to cut corners to save costs in an inflationary economy, but this hasn't prevented them from raising the cost of the bags of chips a bit again this year, which makes it even harder to stomach.  

Bleh. Anyway, I'll try to piece the set together bag by bag with my kids again, on the plus side I think my duaghter might like the mascot cards so they've got that going for them!

1979 Calbees?

 

I picked up a pile of 1979 Calbees the other day which has got me thinking about whether they might be a realistic set build. I have, with these new ones, more than a hundred 1979s which is usually about the point at which I make the move from dabbling to set building.

There are two things that have held me back on committing to this set. The first is that it is confusing as hell. It was released in 12 series of differing sizes, and none of the cards are numbered so keeping track of them is a nightmare.  The card fronts all look the same too, just having a photo and nothing else, which adds to the confusion. Having organized them into a binder I've figured out how to distinguish them from the card backs, but the lack of numbers is a real pain in the ass when it comes to searching  for cards you need.

The other stumbling block is that two of the series (Red Helmets and CL Championship Series) are short printed and quite expensive. I think they were only released in Hiroshima, though I'm not certain. I don't have any cards from either and they only occasionally come up for sale on Yahoo Auctions, always at high prices.

Another minor point against them is that the photos on most cards are a bit more boring than the ones from other 1970s Calbee sets. Its not as bad as contemporary sets, but there are way more boring posed shots and head and shoulders profiles in this one, which makes it less interesting to me.

On the other hand, this set was issued in an interesting way that has always intrigued me. Most of the series (and most of the cards I have) feature players who received the most votes in a given month from fans. So one series would have the top vote getters from April, another from May, etc etc. Its kind of cool.

I think this one belongs in my "soft" set in progress category - I'll pick up cards I need for it when I find a deal and don't have anything else exciting to spend my monthly card budget on, but otherwise its on the backburner.