2018 SCC KBO Collection set

Got a package in the mail from Dan Skrezyna last week containing the latest KBO card sets from Daewoo Media.  The first set I'm going to talk about is the 2018 SCC set that I think is officially called "KBO Collection".

This set came out back in August.  It contains 253 total cards but the last 13 are all autograph cards so the base set is 240 cards.  The cards are split evenly between the 10 KBO teams so each team has 24 cards.

What gets a little confusing about the base set is there are five different types of cards in it.  There are 100 "normal" cards, 45 "rare" cards, 43 "holo" cards, 43 "facsimile autograph" cards and 9 "rookie" cards.  Each category is not split up evenly between the 10 teams (which is obvious for anything beyond the "normal" cards).  SK has only 7 "normal" cards while NC has 14!  Each team has anywhere between 3 (Hanwha) and 6 (SK) "rare" cards, 2 (Doosan) and 7 (Samsung) "holo" cards and 1 (NC) and 8 (Doosan) "facsimile autograph" cards.  Each team has only one "rookie" card except Lotte which has two and NC and SK which have none.  The "holo" cards The "normal" and "rare" cards have a matte finish while the others have a glossy finish.  I don't know if any of the cards other than the "normal" cards are short-printed - you'd think that at least the "rare" ones would be but I don't know if that's the case.

I don't know a whole lot about the KBO so I don't have a sense for how good the player selection is in it.  As usual there are no foreign players in the set.  Most of the guys who've played in MLB and NPB show up including Lee Dae-Ho, Lim Chang-Yong, Park Byung-Ho, Kim Hyun-Soo, and Hwang Jae-Gyun.  The set also includes stars like Choi Jeong, Han Dong-Min and Son Ah-Seop.  Off hand the only guys I noticed who seemed to be missing were Lee Bum-Ho and Kim Tae-Kyun.

Here's some sample cards from each type:

#SCCR-01/079 Kang Yoon-Koo (Normal)

#SCCR-01/176 Seo Kyun (Normal)

#SCCR-01/047 Park Kun-Woo (Rare)

#SCCR-01/112 Kim Sung-Hyun (Rare)

#SCCR-01/196 Jang Pill-Joon (Holo)

#SCCR-01/001 Lim Chang-Yong (Holo)

#SCCR-01/230 Shim Woo-Jun (Facsimile Autograph)

#SCCR-01/116 No Soo-Kwang (Facsimile Autograph)

#SCCR-01/159 Kim Hye-Sung (Rookie)

#SCCR-01/066 Han Dong-Hee (Rookie)

I have to say that this is a very nice set.  It's very attractive once you get over the multiple card types in the base set.  The photos are attractive and aren't all "pitchers pitching, batters batting" like most of BBM's NPB issues lately.  My one main gripe with the set is that there's no biographical or statistical information on the back of the cards - they're all identical.  Which makes sense if they were used in some sort of collectible card game but I don't see any evidence that that's the case.  Here's what the backs look like:

Dan wrote about this set back at the end of August and he's also uploaded the checklist and images of the entire set to TradingCardDB.com.  I want to thank Dan for getting me the set.