The Wyverns, the Raiders and the 2000 Teleca Set Revisited

I did a post last March talking about the origins of the KBO team the SK Wyverns, who were founded in February of 2000 to replace the Ssangbangwool Raiders who had folded a month earlier.  The focus of my post was how the Raiders' folding and the Wyverns' founding was handled by Teleca in their KBO baseball card set that year.  There were only eight teams in the KBO that season but Teleca included nine teams in their card set - they had cards of both the Raiders and Wyverns.  

I have speculated that Teleca issued their set in two printings - the first printing included the cards for the Raiders and the second printing replaced the Raiders cards with Wyvern cards.  Most of my "evidence" for this happening is fairly circumstantial and mostly deals with the distribution of the cards I had at the time and what's printed on the wrapper of the one pack of cards that I opened.  I won't repeat all that here - you can go see it in the original post if you like.

I have since come across a little more evidence that this is actually what happened.  The first was a discovery that Dan Skrezyna had a pack wrapper from 2000 Teleca that didn't look like the one I had.  Here's Dan's:

Here's mine:

I pulled a Wyvern card from my pack so my assumption is that the blue packs are for the second printing while the white packs are for the first.  It is kind of odd that the white packs have the Wyverns logo on them even though I don't think there would have been any Wyverns cards in them.  The back of the white packs say that there are 200 cards in the base set when in reality the set had 225 cards.

Last weekend Dan asked Thomas St. John, quite probably the biggest authority on Korean baseball cards and someone who had worked with Teleca back when they were making cards, about this.  Thomas said he wasn't 100% sure but he thinks that my speculation is correct.  "I think once the team name got changed then they had to kind of react a little bit fast."

So based on the wrappers and Thomas' memory, I feel it's even more likely that this is what happened.

When I did the post last year, I pointed out that there were 14 players who had two cards in the set - one with the Raiders and one with the Wyverns.  At the time I didn't have the Wyverns card of any of those players but last week I picked up about half of the remaining 40-ish cards I needed to complete the set from Robert Klevens of Prestige Collectibles which included the Wyverns cards for six of these players.  So here are the Raiders and Wyverns cards for each of these six players:

#189 & #213

#180 & #206

#179 & #205

#182 & #208

#170 & #194

#188 & #212

I also received a number of cards for Wyverns players who had not been former Raiders players along with the card of manager Kang Byung-Chul and the Wyverns team checklist:

#216

#203

#204

#211

#198

#200

#196

#225

Additionally I got six of the "Star Rookie" inserts and two of the "'99 Korea-Japan Super Games" inserts:

#R16

#R14

#R13

#R5

#R24

#R21

#KJ26

#KJ33

Thanks to Robert for selling me the cards and thanks to Dan and Thomas for providing more evidence that my speculation about the set is correct.