2014 Super Star Korean Baseball Card Season Three

Duael Entertainment, the Korean company that made the "Super Star Baseball" cards for the KBO last season released a third set (called "Season Three") back in the fall.  I am a bit late to the party on this set but I have excuses.  I think this set was released in late October or early November because if memory serves me correctly, there was a promo event for this set during the KBO playoffs.  The Ebay seller that I had bought the unopened boxes for the first two sets last year never sold boxes for the set so it wasn't until I made a trade with Dan Skrezyna in January that I got some cards from the set (I must point out that Dan was extremely generous in his trade, sending me around 100 cards from all three "Super Star Baseball" sets for a bunch of Ichiro and Hideki Matsui cards from the late 1990's).  I picked up a couple insert/short print cards from the set off of Ebay and I needed to wait until I received them so I could include them in this post.  So, finally, four or five months late, I can finally write about the set.

The first set of "Super Star Baseball" cards (called "Season One") last year featured 126 cards - 72 "regular" cards and 54 short-printed cards split into "Super Star" (SS), "Big Star" (BS) and "All Star" (AS) cards.  The checklist made no distinctions between the regular or short print cards.  The second set (called "Season Two") had 189 cards - 126 base set (regular) cards, 54 short printed cards that were numbered as parallel versions of the base cards, again split into "Super Star", "Big Star" and "All Star" cards, and nine memorabilia cards (also numbered as parallel versions of base set cards).  There were also 54 possible autograph cards that are not considered part of the set but are again numbered as parallel versions of the base set.

The "Season Three" set did things a little differently.  This set has 154 cards - Nine memorabilia cards (numbered in the checklist 1-9), nine "Super Star" cards (numbered 10-18), 23 "Big Star" cards (numbered 19-41), 41 "All Star" cards (numbered 42-82) and 72 "regular" cards (numbered 83-154).  Everything except the "regular" cards are short printed.  Like "Season Two", there are 54 possible autographed cards that are not considered part of the set and have checklist numbers 155-208.  The short print cards are not necessarily for players who are in the "regular" cards.

Let's talk about the "regular" cards first.  The 72 cards are split evenly among the 9 KBO teams so there's 8 cards per team (down from 14 in the first two sets).  Once again there are no foreign players included in the set and no repeated players from the first two sets.  The card design is pretty much the same as "Season Two" - the only real difference I can see is there are a handful of cards that say "Rising Star" in the ball in the lower left of the front of the card rather than the "Star X" where X is some single digit number.

#084 Jab-Yong Jin

#093 Duk-Joo Ham

#102 Kyung-Soo Park

#111 Dae-Woo Kim

#116 Ki-Hyuk Park

#130 Sung-Yong Hong

#136 Min-Ho Park

#142 Da-Won Kim

#150 Hak-Joon Lee

The backs of all the cards are the same.  In fact, they are the same as the backs of the first two sets:

The nine "Super Star" cards show the captains for each team:

#016-SS Ho-Joon Lee

The 23 "Big Star" cards are apparently for the members of Team Korea, although I do not know what event this national team was for.  The players are shown in their KBO team uniforms so it really isn't a National Team set.  As with "Season Two" these are the only cards with the player's name in English.  The one card I have from this subset/insert set is a parallel with some sort of checkboard hologram foil on it:

#026-BS Jung-Ho Kang

The 41 "All Star" cards are all actual players from the KBO All Star teams.

#058-AS Jung-Ho Kang

 The backs of the cards in all three subsets/insert sets have the same design.  They are the only cards in the set that have biographical and statistical information for the player on the back.

Back of #026-BS

I want to thank Jason and Dan for getting the checklist for this set up at The Trading Card Database with a bunch of sample cards.