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: