Sunday, February 23, 2020

Fighters Playing Cards


I picked up an odd item a couple weeks ago.  It's a team set for the Nippon-Ham Fighters that doubles as a deck of cards.  The set was issued in 2015 and looks like it was published by the team itself.

I've seen similar sets in the past but this is a really nice little set.  It has a good selection of photos and the cards themselves use a borderless design which I almost always like.  The set contains 54 cards (the standard 52 card deck plus two Jokers) and has individual cards for 51 players.  There's also a card showing the 2014 draft class with manager Hideki Kuriyama in front of the Sapporo clock tower and cards for mascots Polly Polaris and B*B. 

The set includes cards of all the biggest names on the Fighters that season including Shohei Ohtani, Sho Nakata, Kensuke Kondoh, Daikan Yoh, Kensuke Tanaka, Hirotoshi Masui and Shota Ohno.  Since the Fighters had 67-ish players on their 70 man roster that year there's around 16 players who didn't have a card but I don't think anyone significant got left out.  There's only two gaijin players included (Brandon Laird and Luis Mendoza) and none of the players from the 2014 draft class have individual cards (so no rookie card of Kohei Arihara).  Kuriyama doesn't have his own card either but he's on the back of every card:


Here's a bunch of example cards:











It's hard to tell from my scans but the cards have rounded corners (like you'd expect from playing cards).  The Kenshi Sugiya card is the only one with a horizontal photo.

One odd thing about the photo selection - the cards of Satoshi Nakajima and Hiroshi Kisanuki show them at their retirement games at the end of the 2015 season.  So the set must have been issued late in 2015.  The back of the box says "Not For Sale" so I wonder if this was some sort of fan club giveaway, maybe at the team's fan festival that is usually held in November.

1 comment:

Fuji said...

Very cool item. I can see Ohtani collectors scouring the internet to find one of these. And I know at least one guy who would probably enjoy that Laird.