Team Issued Cards - Orix, Kintetsu, Lions & Giants

One of my card shopping goals for my trip to Japan was trying to locate a wide variety of team issued cards.  I got cards issued by eight different teams including two of the three that I previously didn't have any cards from (the Dragons and the Baystars - still don't have any from the Carp).  I thought I'd do a quick post on the cards I got for four of the teams - I got a larger number of cards for each of the other four teams so I'll probably do a separate post for each of them.

First up is a bunch of cards from Orix.  The first four of these come from the 1990's when they were still the BlueWave.  I got these at the Mint Umeda store in Osaka.  I was not impressed with what I saw at the store until I discovered a tray full of a bunch of oddball cards including these:

1992 Satoshi Nakajima

1997 Satoshi Nakajima

1997 Akira Ohgi

1998 So Taguchi

Ryan included this 2010 Bs Club card of Ikki Shimamura with the rest of the cards he had for me in Tokyo:

Orix put out a nationally issued set earlier this season.  Jambalaya has all the cards online here.  I picked up these two cards at Wrappers in Tokyo:

Moving on to the original Buffaloes team - that tray full of oddball cards in Osaka also had some cards issued by Kintetsu:

1994 Lee Stevens

1996 Yukio Arai

2002 Yasunari Takagi

2003 "Gold" Tuffy Rhodes

2003 Koichi Isobe

2003 Masataka Nashida

I have a lot of cards issued by the Lions but I was still happy to get a couple more.  I picked up this 2001 Tsutomu Itoh "Original Player Card" at G-Freak in Tokyo.  It doesn't look like it's from the same set as the other 2001 Lions cards I have.

Ryan had these two cards for me - one from 2017 and the other from 2018:

Lastly I picked up a bunch of cards for the Giants.  The first six of these I got at Mint Kanda in Tokyo.  I don't know what year these first two are from but it can't be any earlier than 2009 because that was the first year Sakamoto wore number 6:

This is a Giants Winner Game Card from 2012 featuring Shuichi Murata:

This 2013 "card" of Ryosuke Miyaguni is actually a set of stickers attached to a blank backed backing card:

In 2013 the Giants had a whole series of cards featuring OB players given away at home games during the season.  I already had a bunch of these but I added this card Toshimitsu Suetsugu:

Based on the back of the following card (and a couple others I saw at Mint Kanda that I didn't buy), it looks like Sports Hochi and/or Adidas teamed up with the team to do some sort of Giants History set in 2014 - I assume to celebrate the team's 80th Anniversary.  This card celebrates Tsuneo Horiuchi opening the 1966 season with 13 consecutive wins - a year in which he went 16-2 and won the Rookie Of The Year award:

I found the last two Giants cards at Mint Yokohama with Dan.  I saw a couple of what I thought were oversized cards in a clear wrapper but Dan pointed out were actually folders containing a standard size card.  They were issued in 2008 and are entitled "Players Day".  Here's the cards out of the folders:

Here's the front of Ogasawara's folder:

Here's what the inside of the folder looks like with the card still in it:

Dan pointed out that the cardboard of the folder digs in to the sides of the card, making it difficult to get a high grade on the card if you're looking to get it slabbed.