Konami's most recent collectible card game was called Baseball Collection. Apparently the cards were won by playing an arcade game and were subsequently used in the playing of more games. Konami produced the cards for five years, from 2018 to 2022.
Or so I thought.
I was recently made aware through a comment by a reader to an old post that Konami did a number of "test events" for the game in late 2017 and early 2018. These events apparently featured cards that I'd never seen before - or had even heard about. The person who commented on the post mentioned that there was a test event in Osaka that he was particularly interested in.
I did a little research to see if I could find out anything about these cards. I went back to the search page for Baseball Collection on Suruga-ya's website - the same one I had used last year to figure out how Konami numbered their cards. I plugged "2017" into the search field and was pleasantly surprised to have a list of 134 cards appear. The cards appeared to be in two groups based on the prefixes of the card numbers. There were 14 cards with a "201701" prefix and 120 cards with a "201702" prefix. All of the "01" cards had a release date of September 22, 2017 associated with them along with the text "Baseball Collection Location Test Version Round One Umeda Store Exclusive"*. All of the "02" cards had a release date of October 1, 2017 and had the text "Baseball Collection Location Test Version".
* To be clear - the text was associated with the listing of the cards at Suruga-ya - not on the cards themselves
Umeda, of course, is in Osaka so my first thought was that this was the event that the commenter was referencing.
According to the card lists, it looked like there was one card per team for the "201701" cards plus two extra cards of Shohei Ohtani (there's a total of three Ohtani cards in this group of cards - one of which is at the top of this post) and ten cards per team for the "201702" cards (and no Ohtani cards).
So we've established that there were definitely 2017 Baseball Collection cards. But I wondered what else I could find out about the test events. Well, to be completely accurate, I wondered what Kenny and Ryan could find out about the test events as both of them are ,uch better at finding out stuff about gaming cards that I am.
Kenny found a long video showing someone playing the game in early 2018 and a brief mention of the game in a preview of new games from early February, 2018. Ryan found someone selling another Ohtani card from the "201701" cards (the extremely low price of which makes me think it's an old listing).
Both of them independently of each other found a very useful site that contains a great deal of information about the test events for the game. That site confirmed that the initial test event began on September 22, 2017 at the Round One Umeda store*. This was followed by another event in mid-October at an unrecorded location in Aichi (I don't think it was a secret test or anything, I'm guessing the author of the page simply didn't know where it was).
The next event wouldn't be until mid-January of 2018 at the Silk Hat Kawasaki Dice store (Silk Hat being a chain of arcades) which was followed by an event in mid-to-late February as "Sports Wave Iron Arm 24 Hamano Store Comtec Tower" which I think is in Chiba (not positive but I think Sports Wave is part of the Yamazakiya arcade chain). The next event was in early March in Hiroshima at the Amipara arcade (Amipara being another arcade chain). Later in March, there were two events at Round One locations in Yokohama and Fukuoka. The final events (or at least the final ones listed) were at the end of April and beginning of May at both the Silk Hat Kawasaki Dice store and the Giga Zone Hiroshima Station store (which apparently closed at the end of August, 2021).
The site also gives the pricing information. It cost 300 yen for one credit which allowed you to play one game and get one card. The cards apparently were actually printed by the game machine (as opposed to simply dispensed). It was possible to buy multiple credits/cards at one time but there was no discount. Two credits were 600 yen, three were 900 yen and four were 1200 yen. Five was, as you'd expect, 1500 yen but you would be guaranteed that one of your five cards was a "Rare" (or better) card. The next listed increment is nine - I don't know if that meant you couldn't buy six, seven or eight credits in one go or not. The nine cards (2700 yen) would be include two "Rare" (or better) cards.
I was initially thinking that the listing at Suruga-ya of the 2017 cards might be comprehensive, even though there were only 14 of the "201701" cards, but doing a search of "ベースボールコレクションロケテスト" ("Baseball Card Location Test") on Mercari disabused me of that notion. To be fair, it may have a complete listing of the "201702" cards but the Mercari search came up with additional "201701" cards. What should have tipped me off that that wasn't a complete listing of the "201701" cards is that 12 of the 14 were marked as "UR" or "Ultra Rare" while there was only one "Rare" card and one "Normal" card. I want to show a couple sample "201701" cards although the only "UR" card I've seen is the Ohtani card at the top of this post. That image was swiped from Suruga-ya but you can also see the card at this post on Mercari - in case you feel like spending 355,050 yen ($2432). Here's a couple "R" ("Rare") cards:
And a couple "N" ("Normal") cards:
Here's what the backs of the cards look like. The backs are the same regardless of whether the card in "UR", "R" or "N":
Konami changed the card design completely between the "201701" cards and the "201702" cards. The "201702" cards look very similar to the 2018 cards. Konami also changed the designation of the rarest cards from "UR" ("Ultra Rate") to "SR" ("Super Rare"). Here are example cards of each type - "N", "R" and "SR" (all three images were swiped from Suruga-ya):
The card backs again were the same regardless of whether the card was "SR", "R" or "N":
In paleontology, we'd refer to this card back as a "transitional fossil" as it exhibits traits of its predecessor (the card number not including the player's uniform number) as well as its successors (the rest of the card back looks pretty much the same as the card backs for the 2018-22 cards).
Because there's a three month gap between the initial test events in September/October of 2017 and the later test events in January-May of 2018, I'm going to guess that the "201701" cards were used in the 2017 events and the "201702" cards were used in the 2018 events. The author of the web page that both Kenny and Ryan pointed me at attended a couple of the events in Kanto in January, February and April and all the cards in the photos on the site appear to be the "201702" cards.
As you might expect with the "2017" test events lasting until May of 2018, the "official" 2018 Baseball Collection cards were not released until September 25th, nearly the end of the baseball season. Curiously, the first digraph on the 2018 card numbers (the two digits following the year in the first group of numbers) was "10" while it was "00" in subsequent years. The remaining four sets were released near the beginning of the baseball season - late March of each year except 2020 when COVID delayed the start of the season until June.
Thanks again to Kenny and Ryan (as well as the unknown author of that website) for doing the research for me on this.
