And with the new season has come the annual ritual of visiting multiple convenience stores trying to get that first sighting of this year`s Calbee cards. After taking in a few I finally found a 7-11 which had them last week at lunch so I bought a bag and brought it back to my desk at work. I got Yamazaki and Higa.
The next day I bought another bag. I got Yamazaki and Higa.
I wonder what the odds of this happening are. Probably pretty slim. If only I had placed a bet on this happening beforehand, I could probably retire off the winnings.
Anyway, except for getting the exact same pack, which I assume is related to the way Calbee packs these (though it has never happened before to me), I kind of like the new set. They made a slight change to the design this year, the player`s name is in a larger font and in black lettering with a thin white border. While by no means a major change, it actually does give the cards a somewhat bolder look than previous sets with the solid white lettering, so I give them high marks for it.
So I am looking forward to pack #3 and hoping it will have somebody - anybody - other than Yamazaki and Higa (though Ido love the photograph on Yamazaki`s card).
Too bad you got the same pack twice! I think I had that problem last year with some of my packs too, so I think it's a packaging artifact. NPB Card Guy posted a box bust of 1991 BBM and it seems that they were packaged seemingly predictably, and I'm pretty sure I've opened some other boxes of cards (Japanese and US, MLB and non-sport) where collation was pretty non-random.
ReplyDeleteI saw that post about the 1991 BBM. It is possible that I have had this problem with Calbee packs before but just never noticed. When it is your first two packs though, it really hits you!
ReplyDeleteI remember back in 1989 if you opened a single pack of Upper Deck cards it was possible to figure out exactly which cards would be contained in the pack below it (and below that one, etc). I think every dealer around probably used that trick to snag all the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards. Once everyone figured that out, nobody wanted to buy individual packs anymore since they knew they had all probably been cherry picked of the Griffeys. I think Upper Deck did that for a few years before they changed the collation.