DigiCube

One of my goals in card shopping in Japan was to locate some examples of a couple card sets that I was sort of aware of but hadn't really seen at all - the 2000 and 2001 DigiCube Chunichi Dragons sets.  I had discovered these sets existed when I saw unopened boxes for them on sale on Yahoo! Japan Auctions but the only cards from the set I had ever seen were one that Ryan had found a few years back and an OB card Zippy Zappy had gotten last winter.

These cards aren't listed in Engel but they were listed in Sports Card Magazine when they listed the non-BBM baseball card sets in the July issue every year (or at least every year that I was getting SCM regularly).  The 2000 set had a base set of 109 cards - cards 1 to 108 plus an unnumbered checklist.  There are an additional 36 cards that I'm guessing are short printed - a nine cards subset devoted to Senichi Hoshino (cards 109 to 117), a "Millennium Best 9" subset (cards 118 to 126) and another 18 card subset that I can't translate.  Zippy Zappy's card is from the "Millenium Best 9" subset.  The 2001 set had a base set of 90 cards - cards 1 to 88 plus two unnumbered checklists.  There are 20 more cards that are short prints - I'm not sure what the subset is called but it looks like it contains 2001 Dragons players.  There apparently is also one or more parallel versions of these 20 cards.

I was ultimately successful in finding some of these cards.  I got two cards from each set.  Surprisingly I didn't find them in Nagoya although I suspect I would have if I'd looked harder at any of the three stores I was in there.  I picked them up at Wrappers in Tokyo.

Here are the 2000 cards:

#021

#017

Here's what one of the backs looks like - despite the fronts having somewhat different designs the backs look the same:

#021 (Kuji)

Here are the 2001 cards - not to knock Kuji (the 1992 Central League Rookie Of The Year and 2 time All Star) and Nakamura (an 8 time All Star) but I was a little happier with these two cards:

#001

#052

Here's what the back of the Yamasaki card looks like:

#052

Now that I've seen these I wouldn't mind getting some more.  I did a quick look on Yahoo! Japan Auctions but there currently aren't any unopened boxes.  I'll have to keep my eyes open.