1991 QCard All Stars

Q Card was the other card company that started up in 1991.  Unlike BBM, however, they never issued anything else after that year.  Their primary product that year was a set of 120 plastic cards of NPB players.  In addition they put out a 62 card boxed set featuring the players and coaches from the 1991 All Star game.  I've written about the plastic card set before but I didn't have any of the All Star cards until this past week.

The 62 cards in set included 56 players, the two managers (Motoshi Fujita from the Giants and Masaaki Mori of the Lions) and the four coaches (all of whom were managers of other teams - Shozo Doi of the BlueWave, Akira Ohgi of the Buffaloes, Yutaka Sudoh of the Whales and Koji Yamamoto of the Carp).  The set has the same checklist as BBM's All Star set from that year.  Probably the most significant cards in the set are the cards of Hideo Nomo and Atsuya Furuta as they could be considered rookie cards for them (although Nomo had a card in the 1990 Takara Buffaloes set).  Other big names in the set include Hall Of Famers Koji Akiyama, Tatsunori Hara, Tsutomo Itoh, Hiromitsu Kadota, Kimiyasu Kudoh, Hiromitsu Ochiai, Yutaka Ohno and Kazuyoshi Tatsunami along with Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Norihiro Komada, Masumi Kuwata, Kenjiro Nomura, Shinji Sasaoka and Yukio Tanaka.  There are also two Western players in the set - Jim Traber and Matt Winters.

I had mentioned that the cards in the other Q Card set were plastic.  I was actually expecting that these would be plastic as well but they are on regular card stock.  They are about the same size as the plastic cards (2 1/8" by 3 3/8") but unlike the plastic cards they don't have rounded corners.  They are unnumbered, just like the plastic cards.  The fronts of the cards look very similar to the plastic cards.

I had discovered a few weeks back that someone had a bunch of these up on COMC so I decided to pick up the cards of six of my favorite players in the set:

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

The stat line is from all the All Star games that Kadota had played in.

I'm not a huge fan of the regular Q Card set so it's kind of a surprise to me that I kind of like these - although probably not enough to get any more of them.  It may just be the novelty of them - I knew the set existed but I don't think I'd ever actually seen any of them before coming across them on COMC.