Magazine Cards

I want to do yet another quick post about some cards I picked up on the trip.  This time it's cards that were distributed with magazines and it really will be a quick one.

One of my goals right now is to pick up all the cards that were distributed with the "Season Memorial" issue of Shukan Baseball every year between 2005 and 2016.  There are 36 total cards with four cards per year between 2005 and 2010 and two cards each year from 2011 to 2016.  I had asked Ryan to pick up a couple from 2006 off of Yahoo! Japan Auctions a few months back and it was among the cards he gave me when we met up in Tokyo:

What was kind of interesting about these cards is that they were still in the original package.  The cards were distributed in an envelope that was attached to the binding of the magazine.  Each card was sealed in plastic on one side of the envelope.  As I said, there were four possible cards but you only got two of them in magazine and there was no way to know which two.  Someone had removed the envelope from the magazine and split it open so that there were two separate pieces that each had one sealed card.  Here's what the outsides of the envelope looked like:

I did a scan of the cards still sealed on the envelope sides but it's hard to really see anything:

I have liberated the cards from the envelope sides.

I discovered that Bits had a number of these cards but I ran into a problem with my want list.  While it listed the cards that I knew I needed, there are a couple years where I'm unsure of what the cards are.  For example, for 2008 I know that two of the cards are Alex Ramirez and Satoshi Komatsu but I don't know who the other two cards are.  Now normally this doesn't present a problem for me because if I see one of these cards on Yahoo! Japan Auctions while browsing at home, I can check my database or even the card binder to see if I already have it or not.  I had neither of those resources handy at Bits, of course, and to make matters worse, the cards were a bit on the pricey side so I didn't want to just buy them all and sort it out later like I might have if they'd been 100 yen each.  I picked up this 2007 Michihiro Ogasawara for 500 yen because I knew it was one I needed:

But I also picked up a 2005 Yasutomo Kubo card for 500 yen that it turned out I already had.  I've updated my want list now to list the cards I have as well as the ones I know I'm missing to hopefully prevent a repeat of this in the future.

Bits surprised me by having one of the two cards I was missing from the 2004 Yomiuri Giants 70th Anniversary magazine.  It was 800 yen which may have been one of the most expensive cards I bought on the entire trip but I figured it was unlikely I was going to see it again:

For the record, the other cards that were available in the magazine were Eiji Sawamura, Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  I now have all of them except Nagashima.

Finally Ryan and I were browsing one of the Mandarake stores at Nakano Broadway just a few hours before my flight left for home.  This particular one had a bunch of old magazines and I came across a 2005 Tigers Interleague Program.  It was shrink-wrapped and two baseball cards were sliding around inside the wrap.  I had remembered that BBM had done cards for the Interleague programs in both 2005 and 2006 so I bought the magazine.  It was 1000 yen which I figured wasn't too bad.  Since the magazine had been sold at Tigers home interleague games, both cards were Tigers players:

There were 24 cards in all - two per team.  Here's what the front of the magazine looks like (although it's a little bigger than my scanner can scan):

There's an ad at the back of the magazine that shows all 24 cards.  I took a picture of it since I figured that I might damage the magazine trying to scan the page:

Miscellaneous Card Pickups

I wanted to do a somewhat quick post about a bunch of random cards that I picked up on the trip.  Most of these were cards on my want list (which is much smaller now than before I left).

There were nine BBM team sets from between 2003 and 2007 that I was trying to complete.  I had gotten unopened boxes for most of them back in the day and decided a few years ago to get the cards I had missed on them.  I ended up completing six of them (2003 Giants, 2004 Baystars, 2005 Dragons & Swallows, and 2006 Swallows & Tigers) and reducing the number of cards I needed for two of the other sets to two each (2004 Giants & Tigers).  I had only needed one card from the 2007 Tigers set but it eluded me.  I'm not going to show all the cards I got from these sets but here's a single card from each:

2003 BBM Giants #036

2004 BBM Baystars #YB58

2004 BBM Giants #G45

2004 BBM Tigers #T36

2005 BBM Dragons #D59

2005 BBM Swallows #S78

2006 BBM Swallows #TY44

2006 BBM Tigers #053

I got most of these at either Bits in Nagoya or Mint Hakata in Fukuoka.  I had looked at Quad Sports but didn't find anything on my want list - Ryan eventually pointed out that he had already searched my want list there!

I had compiled a list a few months back of all the guys who had appeared in BBM's high end sets (Diamond Heroes, Touch The Game and Genesis) without having in the same year's flagship set.  I decided that I didn't want to get all the cards on the list but just the ones I found interesting for one reason or another (player I liked, only card for a foreign player, etc).  I don't remember how many cards I had originally decided to get but by the time I left for Japan, there were 23 cards I was still looking for.  Between Bits, Mint Hakata and Mint Odawara, I got all 23 of them.  Here's eight of those, one card from pretty much every set I got cards from:

1996 BBM Diamond Heroes #186

1997 BBM Diamond Heroes #154

1998 BBM Diamond Heroes #60

1999 BBM Diamond Heroes #105

2001 BBM Diamond Heroes #5

2005 BBM Touch The Game #009

2013 BBM Genesis #023

2014 BBM Genesis #048

I've become a big fan of the "Great Record" insert sets from BBM's Fusion sets.  I've gotten the complete insert set with my base set every years since 2019 so I decided to go back and get the ones from 2016 to 2018 as well.  The bulk of these I picked up at Quad Sports along with one or two that I got at Coletre.  I needed 65 of the 72 total cards (24 each year) and I came home with 63 of them.  Here's one card from each set:

2016 BBM Fusion #GR24

2017 BBM Fusion #GR21

2018 BBM Fusion #GR19

The other set that I'm trying to complete is the 1999 BBM Mr. Giants set.  This is a biographical set for Shigeo Nagashima but it includes cards of rival pitchers, teammates and players who he managed as well.  I needed 56 cards - roughly half the set - and I came home with 47 of them (and Ryan has since picked up the other nine for me).  I got most of these at Bits with a couple others at Quad Sports and Mint Hakata.  Here's three of the cards:

1999 BBM Mr. Giants #G1

1999 BBM Mr. Giants #G43

1999 BBM Mr. Giants #G82

The 2012 BBM Fighters team set had a three card subset entitled "Kamagaya Rookies" that included cards of three rookies wearing Nippon-Ham's farm team uniforms.  I've had two of the cards - Go Matsumoto and Takumi Ohshima - for a while but tracking down the last - Kensuke Kondoh - has been difficult.  When I've seen it, it's been much more expensive that I was willing to pay.  Luckily, Mint Hakata had it for a very reasonable price.

2012 BBM Fighters #F70

The final cards from my want list are ones that Ryan had picked up for me - the last three "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards I needed from the 2021 BBM Fusion set:

2021 BBM Fusion #FP47

2021 BBM Fusion #FP42

2021 BBM Fusion #FP35

The rest of the cards I'm going to show are just ones that I came across that appealed to me.  First up are three "secret version" parallels from the 2020 BBM 30th Anniversary set.  What's interesting about these is instead of being a photo variant, they're "design variants" - they use the same photo as the original card but the card design mirrors the 1991 BBM design instead of the "regular" 30th Anniversary card design.  I picked these up at Mint Urawa:

2020 BBM 30th Anniversary #124 "Secret Version"

2020 BBM 30th Anniversary #158 "Secret Version"

2020 BBM 30th Anniversary #180 "Secret Version"

Back in 2008 and 2009, BBM issued small figurines of players with baseball cards.  I think the figurines only came with the cards in 2009 and they only did them for a handful of the teams.  Deanna shared some photos wth me and I did a post about them way-back-when but I had never seen any in the wild until I was at Bits.  Well, to be entirely accurate, I haven't seen the figurines in the wild but Bits had a couple of lose cards so I picked one up:

2009 BBM Dragons Figure Card #D-07

It's difficult to tell from the scan but the card is much smaller than standard size.  It's about 1.25 inches wide and a little over 3.5 inches high.

The next batch of cards I picked up while happily rummaging through boxes of cards at G-Freak one afternoon.  There's no real rhyme or reason to why I got them, just random cards:

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #BN07

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #BN18

2007 BBM Draft Story #LS7

2013 BBM The Trade Stories #BS6

2013 BBM The Trade Stories #BS3

2003 BBM Tigers Victory Road #35

2003 BBM Tigers Victory Road #49

2002 BBM 1st Version #PP6

2010 BBM 1st Version #GG02

This last card is the only non-BBM card in this post.  It's from a 2018 set that Epoch did in conjunction with "The Museum Of Hanshin Koshien Stadium" called "Footprints Of The Tigers".  I think I picked this up at Mint Odawara:

2018 Epoch Footprints Of The Tigers #26