Saturday, March 8, 2014

2001 Calbee Pack Busting



I bought a lot of 50 2001 Calbee packs off Ebay last week and I thought I'd do a post on what I got.

The seller actually sent me 51 packs.  They were all from 2001 Series One.  That set had 72 regular player cards (doesn't look like that broke down evenly between teams), 18 "Title Holder" cards, 16 "Best 9" cards (for the 2000 Best 9 team less Ichiro, Tsuyoshi Shinjyo and Bobby Rose), 8 "Olympic Team" cards, 11 "2000 Nippon Series" cards and six checklist cards.  There were also some sort of mail in prize cards (which obviously I didn't get any of).

I didn't do too badly on the 51 packs - I got 40 unique cards.  It broke down to 26 player cards, 4 "Title Holder" cards, 2 "Best 9" cards, 2 "Olympic Team" cards, 4 "2000 Nippon Series" cards, one checklist card and one card that's not really a card but some sort of mail in thing - it might be what you send in to get one of the prize cards but I'm not sure.  I was a little bummed that I got three of the "prize" cards as they really don't do me any good now.  I also thought it was odd that I ended up with three Shingo Ono cards.  On the plus side, I didn't previously have any of these cards with the exception of the "Olympic Team" ones, so that's 38 new cards for my collection (well, 37 not including the "prize" card).

Here's some of the cards:

#003

#008

#022

#032

#058

#T-03

#B-04

#J-04

#N-04

The check list cards formed a two by three puzzle.  The back of each card showed where that card fit in:




Lastly, here's one of the promo/prize cards.  Maybe someone who can read Japanese can tell me what it is:


3 comments:

Ryan G said...

Using what little Japanese I have, this is what I gather:

with 2 "Lucky Cards" you get a "present" card holder (those little binders).

with 5 lucky cards you get a free card set, of 12 cards. The names below that list the checklist. This is the JC 57 set with SP- prefix numbers.

10 lucky cards wins you a gold signed set of cards 1-72. These are gold foil signatures.

Calbee packs are fun to open, even if you do only get 1 or 2 per pack. Bummer about the prize cards, though.

NPB Card Guy said...

Thanks! Nice to know what those cards are for.

Sean said...

Great find! It is cool to be able to still find those Calbee packs out there.

It does suck to get the lucky cards today, useless as they are, but those were a really fun promotional thing back in the day. I bought my first Calbee chips in 2004 and actually had a lot of fun collecting those lucky cards. That year if you sent three of them in you would get a set of the gold foil signature Star Cards, which was a pretty cool prize. I ended up getting 2 out of 3 of the sets available (one set for each series that year, I didn`t save up enough lucky cards for the series 3 set).

Sometime in the past few years they stopped giving away sets of cards and started only giving out the card holders which are pretty useless. Now they don`t even have the lucky cards, you are just supposed to cut out a little label on the chip bag itself. I kind of hope they bring them back, it would incetivize me to buy more chips.