2014 Korean Super Star Baseball Card Box Break

I received the two boxes of the new KBO set (Super Star Baseball Card) that I ordered from Ebay in the mail today.  It took about two and a half weeks from when I ordered the cards for them to be delivered.

Unopened Box

Opened Box

Pack

So to recap the stats for the set - each box contains 20 six card packs, so there's 120 cards in each box.  The set itself has 126 cards, but 54 of those cards are short prints so there's only 72 "regular" cards.  Of the 54 "short prints", there are nine "Superstar" cards with gold signatures, 18 "Big Star" cards with hologram text for the player's name, number and team name and 27 "All Star" cards with "holographic" fronts.  All the cards have identical backs except the "All Star" cards.  Everything but the "All Star" cards look like they can be used in some sort of collectible card game.  There are currently nine teams in the KBO and the cards are split evenly among them.  So each team has 14 total cards - 8 "regular", 1 "Superstar", 2 "Big Star" and 3 "All Star".

Here's how the boxes broke down:

Box #1
11 short prints - 1 Superstar, 4 Big Star, 6 All Star
53 unique regular cards
56 duplicate regular cards

Box #2
11 short prints - 1 Superstar, 4 Big Star (but only 3 unique ones), 6 All Star
62 unique regular cards
47 duplicate regular cards

Total for the two boxes
70 unique regular cards
20 unique short prints - 2 Superstar, 7 Big Star, 11 All Star
2 duplicate short prints - 1 Big Star, 1 All Star
148 duplicate regular cards

So I ended up just short of the complete "regular" card set and got a little less than 40% of the short prints.  With 90 cards in all, I have about 71% of the total set.

The cards themselves are reasonably attractive.  They're a little cluttered on the front with the game playing stuff but the photos are pretty nice looking:

#063 Deok-Han Yong

#088 Eu-Tteum Park

#105 Il-Mok Cha

#018 Jae-Ho Kim

#119 Kyeong-Eon Kim

#008 Myung-Gu Kang

Card Back

Great shot of Yong, but he missed the ball...

Here's examples of the "Superstar" and "Big Star" cards:

#043 Byeong-Ho Park

#079 Hee-Sang Yoon

It's a little hard to tell from the scans but Park's signature is gold and Yoon's name, number and team name are in a holographic foil.  I want to stress that these are not parallel versions of "regular" cards - these are the only versions of cards #043 and #079.

Here's an example "All Star" card.  As you can see, it doesn't have any of the game-related text on the front.  The backs of these cards are the only ones that show the player's name in English.  Curiously, the names are given with the surname last.

#030 Byung-Kyu Lee

Back of #030 Byung-Kyu Lee

In addition to the six cards, each pack also contains either an "item" (which apparently can be used in the on-line game the cards go with) or a "redemption" card (that can be exchanged for autographed cards).  Well, at least that's the theory - all 40 packs I opened had an "item" card.  It's just as well as I couldn't have exchanged the "redemption" card anyway.  Here's what one of the "item" cards looked like (with the code removed):

I think the consensus is that this is the first series of cards for the year and there will be an additional series (or more) later this season.  I think I will limit myself to only one box of an additional sets, especially if the ratio of short prints to normal cards continues to be so large.

I've got to give a quick thank you to Jason for doing the ridiculously hard work of transcribing all the Korean names from the checklist on the company website into English and entering them into the Inventory Manager over at Sports Card Forum.