Starting in 2004, Calbee had released three Series each year. Series One would come out in March, Series Two would come out in June and Series Three would come out in September. It was probably a coincidence but the releases were in sync with the change of seasons (as Sean pointed out once). This remained their standard operating procedure for nearly twenty years with the only exception being 2017 when a typhoon the previous year disrupted the potato crop in Hokkaido and limited Calbee to only doing two Series (since the important thing in their eyes were the potato chips and not the cards). In 2023, however, they unexpectedly only did two Series. I'm not entirely sure why they ended up not doing the standard three - they basically told me they needed to delay Series Two that year because Series One was so popular - but there was an obvious clue that they had intended to do three Series that year - the checklist cards. Since 2004, Calbee has included 12 checklist cards - one featuring each NPB team - in their set every year - four in each Series (usually) - with the exception of 2017 and 2023. Since Calbee had planned on doing all three Series both of those years, there were only eight checklist cards altogether with both of the published Series having four checklist cards each.
The bad news for 2024 was that Calbee again only did two Series. The worse news is that it was planned this way as there were still 12 checklist cards. Each Series had six checklist cards so we were back to all 12 teams showing up on one of them.
The "only doing two Series" thing wouldn't be so bad except each Series had fewer cards in it this year than two years ago. Calbee had standardized the number of "regular" cards in each Series at 72 in 2016 (six cards per team) but lowered it to 60 (five per team) last year and kept it there this year. The total number of base cards in Series One was 84 with the 60 "regular" player cards, the six checklists and an 18 card "Title Holder" subset. Series Two had 78 base cards with a 12 card "Player Chairman" subset to go along with the 60 "regular" card and six checklists. The 2024 Calbee base set then contained a total of 162 cards - 120 "regular" cards, 30 subset cards and twelve checklist cards.
Calbee also had their standard two insert sets with their base set cards. The "Legend" inserts from Series One typically have several players who retired the previous year but, this year, it only had a single player - Nobuhiro Matsuda. As usual, there were 24 "Star" insert cards in each Series for a total of 48 overall. In addition, there were two limited edition 12 card box sets - one for each Series - that could only be purchased through Calbee's Amazon.co.jp store. The sets were "Home Run Leaders" for Series One and "Opening Day Pitchers" for Series Two.
It was almost comical that with all the other issues with Calbee this past year - fewer Series and fewer cards altogether - that they also had a couple fairly major errors in Series One. First of all, they listed Hiromi Itoh's height on the back of his card as 176 meters rather than 176 centimeters. The second issue was that some of the "Star" and "Legend" inserts did not have the "kira" finish that the cards normally have. The last issue wasn't with the cards themselves but the packaging - they misspelled the word "Lucky" in katakana in their explanation of how to redeem the "Lucky" cards in Series One. They corrected the Itoh card and the bag so there are two different versions of both out there. I don't believe either version of the Itoh card is particularly rare but that hasn't stopped folks from trying to get big money for them (although I have not actually seen the corrected card so I could be wrong). Calbee avoided a repeat of the misspelled "Lucky" on the package for Series Two by not bothering to have a "Lucky" card promotion with it.
I'm spending a lot of time beating up on Calbee in this post so I'll try to end on the one pleasant surprise from them this year. All of a sudden back at the end of last January, reports started coming out of Kyushu of bags of Calbee chips with baseball cards for the Hawks appearing in stores. There was eventually an announcement that Calbee was doing a 36 card Hawks team set. The set was apparently meant to be a 2023 issue as the front design looked like the regular 2023 Calbee cards and the set was supposed to commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the opening of Fukuoka Dome which was in 1993. It was a regional issue with the cards only being available in Western Japan. I've picked up all the cards off of auction sites in Japan (well, I mean that Ryan has picked them up for me) but I was unable to find any in the card shops I went to last May.
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