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.
Why is it that most of the expensive modern cards are usually the least attractive?
ReplyDeleteThats an interesting question. I wonder if one could pinpoint the year that happened. Most valuable vintage cards are quite attractive, but modern ones less so.
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