How Many Bags of Chips it takes to Complete a Calbee Set

I was strolling around Youtube this morning and found this video which asked an interesting question: How much money does it take to complete a Calbee set one bag of chips at a time?

I've only really made two serious efforts at completing Calbee sets that way.  The first was in 2004 when I was living in Himeji, working as an English teacher, and made a point of coming back from the grocery store with at least 2 or 3 bags of Calbees each time.  The bags only cost 63 Yen back then, but they also only came with 1 card.  I didn't even get halfway on any of the series, but had fun trying.  I was newly married at the time and this was my way of introducing one of my eccentricities to my wife.

The next stab came seven years later in 2011 when I was living in Fukuoka.  Don Quijote, a huge discount retailer, in the summer that year had a glut of bags of Series 1 chips (at least the one near my place did) and put them on sale at 39 Yen per bag, less than half the normal retail rate of 98 Yen. I thought to myself "this is a sign" and once again would return home each day with 2-3 bags that I could never eat with me.  I probably bought about 100 bags that year for just that one series, but only got about half the set.  My wife just thought "Ah, he is at this again."

Since then I haven't really made the attempt, though every year I buy at least a few bags. You just end up with way too many bags of chips and nowhere near to completing a set.  But I always wondered if anybody actually does it.

This video answers that question: Yes, but only insane people who can pay for the chips via lots of YouTube advertising revenue.

The video is by a comedian who bought 2500 bags of 2018 Series 1 to see if he could reach the goal of completing the set with that many bags.  To succeed he wanted not just the regular set and 24 card Star Card insert set, but also the harder to find Star Card gold sign parallel set.

So he actually opened 2500 bags of Yakyu chips which retail for about 250,000 Yen (about 2,000$ US) (though presumably he bought them wholesale in bulk so probably paid less than that).

Unsurprisingly he was able to finish the 72 card base set without difficulty early on in the opening.  And the Star Card insert set was completed next.  And.....in the end he was able to successfully complete even the gold signature parallels too, though he had to open every case to get them.

The video unfortunately doesn't show some interesting data, like which number out of 2500 packs he found the last card needed in, or how many regular sets he was able to put together out of all those (2500 packs equals 5000 cards so probably quite a few). He does tell us that he only pulled 16 Lucky Cards (redeemable for an album) so those are quite rare.

The real takeaway from the video for me though is the sheer futility of trying to do a Calbee set bag by bag.  It cost 250,000 Yen to put that set together - and that is only Series 1!  They'd have to do that two more times to finish the whole 2018 set, which is definitely not worth 750,000 Yen!

Postscript: You might wonder what he did with 2500 bags of chips he had left over.  In a follow up video he reveals that 500 of them he gave out to friends and family, and the other 2000 he took to this Ramen shop (he seems to be friends with the owner) to use in a one month special "chips and ramen" dish.

The Problem with Calbee: 2018 Series 2 is here! And has the worst photo selection Ever

Series 2 of this year's Calbee set was released a little while ago and as with Series 1 I decided to put the set together all in one go from a re-seller on Yahoo Auctions.

I got them in the mail on Monday and.....much though I love Calbee I have to say that I'm not impressed.  Something has been bothering me about Calbee cards for a while now and I had a tough time putting my finger on it until yesterday when flipping through them I realized the problem: consistently unimaginative photo selection.

The photographs in this year's set are the most abysmally predictable ever (I think, they seem to have been doing this for a while now).  I flipped through the entire set of regular cards and realized that the photograph selection progress is entirely governed by three rules which just make this set frustratingly boring.

Rule #1:  All position players are to be shot at home plate in some stage of a swing.

The above are all the position players from the Hawks in the set.  Everyone of them is photographed taking a swing, all of them in the exact same location - that same damn pink sign is visible in the background of all of them.

This is repeated throughout every single team - they are all pictured taking swings, all of them in the exact same spot, with the exact same background.  There is not a single picture of  a position player actually playing the field at his position (except for covered by Rule #2 below).  Or running the bases.  Or in the dugout, or anything else.  Its insanely monotonous to flip through these horrible cards.

Rule #2: The only Exception to Rule #1 is for catchers.

For some reason catchers are allowed to appear at their position in their catching gear.  They are the only position player so honored, though only five of them get that treatment, the rest being pictured in generic swing pictures.

Rule #3: Every pitcher is to be shot while pitching

Batters have to be batting, so I guess they decided pitchers also always have to be shown pitching.  This again however creates a uniformity of backgrounds that makes the cards boring and monotonous to flip through - all the Nippon Ham Fighters pitchers have that same boring green wall in the Sapporo Dome and bit of artificial turf as the backdrop, all the Buffaloes pitchers have the same....boring blue wall in the Osaka Dome as the backdrop, etc etc.

There are no pictures of pitchers doing anything other than being at some point in their wind up - nobody fielding a ground ball, nobody running over to cover first, nobody batting or running the bases or even just posing....its so insanely boring.

Of the seventy base cards in the set there is only ONE which does not slavishly follow these three rules.  It is this card of Takahiro Norimoto celebrating his 1000 strikeout:

Its stands out so much from the other cards in the set that it is refreshing to look at and see....something other than the dugout or bottom of a boring outfield wall as a background.

This photographic laziness is frustrating given the awesome backdrops that they could work with at places like Koshien or Hiroshima's Mazda Stadium.  Its also frustrating given how quirky and awesome photography on Calbee cards used to be, even in the era where they sometimes resorted to taking stills off of TV screens to fill in their needs.

I wonder what the cause of this is.  One thing I notice is that all Calbee photographs are taken either of a player at home plate or on the mound, both of which can be taken from a single location near the dugout.  This suggests either extreme laziness or perhaps the teams have started limiting the access of Calbee photographers to just taking pics from one spot, though I could not imagine why that would be the case. Even if true this also doesn't really explain why they couldn't just take a few pics of guys fielding balls or running the bases to mix things up a bit, as such shots could easily be obtained from the same location.

Whatever the reason, I am quite disappointed.

Catching the Calbee Pack Breakers: New Rite of Spring (and mid-late summer too)

Its barely mid April and I have already completed the first series of this year's Calbee regular cards!

Well, at least I have all the cards in the first series,  it might be unfair to claim that I completed it.

In recent years something which I have mixed feelings about has emerged in the Calbee card collecting world: guys who buy Calbee cases in bulk, bust open all the packs and re-sell them on Yahoo Auctions.

These guys are both a godsend and a curse.  They are a godsend for set collectors like me because the regular cards are not central to their business model.  They just put those together in big lots, sometimes as complete sets, and sell them for peanuts - I paid about 700 Yen including shipping for the entire first series, which would have cost me hundreds of dollars if I had tried to do it by buying bags of chips like I used to.  So there are huge economic efficiencies to be realized by sourcing your Calbee cards from guys like this.

I bought mine from a seller called mri_11k13, you can see his listings here.   As you can see from his listings, which are almost entirely 2018 Calbees, the real money they make are from selling the gold signature parallels, which they sell for about 1000-2000 Yen each.  The regular cards are loss leaders which they just want to get rid of and are priced accordingly.  For a base set-collecting guy like me who has zero interest in the inserts and parallels, this is sort of wonderful.

But it also sort of isn't, which is why I say they are also a curse.  Now that I have all the cards, I have no incentive to go out and try to track down bags of chips in convenience stores like I used to.  Putting the set together is really the main fun part of collecting, simply having the set is actually kind of boring.

This is of course exactly the same complaints that I remember hearing as a young collector in the 1980s from older guys who bemoaned the existence of factory sets as spoiling the fun.  They were right.  Another one of the things I love about Calbee is the lack of factory sets!  But now there exists a de facto equivalent thanks to these wonderful, horrible, great, terrible re-sellers.

Ah, first world problems.

Anyway, I started putting my Calbee sets together primarily through buying from guys like this on Yahoo Auctions about 3 years ago simply because the bargains are too good to resist.  In the past I've generally preferred to buy semi-complete lots rather than full sets like this one so that I at least had a bit of actual collecting to do. This one was more of an impulse purchase that I almost regret, maybe I could send ten random cards back to the guy or something so that I can have an excuse to go buy a few bags of chips and then feel happy when I get one of the cards I gave back.

If you are interested in getting Calbee sets on the cheap from these guys it is worth noting that you have to strike while the iron is hot.  They only do this when a new series comes out and when they sell out (of the cheap regular set lots) they basically disappear from Yahoo Auctions altogether.  So if you want a first Series set of 2018 Calbee now is the time to get it.  You can't find such deals on 2017 or 2016 sets anymore (I just checked!) So waiting for these guys to put the Calbee cards in big lots on Yahoo Auctions has become a new rite for me along with spotting the first Calbee cards on store shelves.  When Series 2 comes out I'll be waiting for both.

Oh and the cards this year, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are pretty awesome. I love the kanji on the card fronts!  Flipping through the cards I noticed that three of them picture players holding up signs commemorating career achievements - Nobuhiro Matsuda of the Hawks (nickname is pachi-pachi because he has this eye twitch) for hitting his 200th home run and Shinnosuke Abe and Masahiro Araki for their 2,000th career hits.

2018 Calbee are here!

 The first series of 2018 Calbee cards hit store shelves the other day and I picked up my first 88 Yen bag of them at my local grocery store yesterday!

I love the "first bag of Calbee Yakyu chips" day, each year its timing roughly coincides with the start of spring, the cherry blossom season, 20 degree days, the end of the Spring Grand Sumo Tournament (Kakuryu won) and of course opening day.

In a shocking and unexpected twist both the bags of chips and the cards themselves look basically exactly the same as they have every year since I bought my first bag 18 years ago!

Well, there is one cool change that I like, they brought back having the player's name written in Japanese script on the card fronts!  They did that with the 2016 set too and I was super excited about it at the time, but then the 2017 set reverted to having the names in Roman letters, which I didn't really like.  Maybe they are going to do this with even numbered years from now on or something?  I'm not sure why they've been flip flopping but I'm happy to see that element of the design back for this year regardless.

Anyway, my first bag netted me a checklist C-1 featuring the Hawks celebrating their championship (which reminds me how much I miss living in Fukuoka) and the regular card of the Baystars' Joe Willard (54)..  

The card backs are pretty much the same as they ever were:

So that is one event in the 2018 calender ticked off.  I'll probably try to find a cheap starter set on Yahoo Auctions and work from there on completing this years', its a lot cheaper and involves way less crumbs than doing it bag by bag (though I'll pick up a few more here and there as the season progresses!)