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.