This post is going to feature a couple of things that I rarely do. The first is that I rarely post about something I've picked up on Ebay on the day I receive it. The second is that the item in question is a Takara set, something I rarely buy anymore.
If you're not familiar with them (and even if you are), a Takara set is a collectible card game set featuring 30 cards for one particular team. Takara issued these sets between 1978 to 1998. They only did the six Central League teams their first three years but expanded to do all 12 NPB teams starting in 1981.
I had a long-ish discussion about Takara sets about six months ago with Dan over Facebook Messenger in which I expressed that I was pretty much burned out on Takara sets. I felt that the ones from 1991 and later are somewhat redundant since BBM's sets feature most of the same players and while the earlier ones feature players who may not have appeared on other cards in the year of issue, the photos are all "mug shots" so they're kind of boring. I've picked up a handful of single cards in recent years, mostly from the late 1970's and early to mid 1980's, but I can't remember the last time I bought a complete 30 card team set. But I saw this available as a $39 "Buy-It-Now" on Ebay last week and decided to get it:
The year and the team may tell you why I was interested in picking this set up, even though I don't think I've EVER spent that much on a Takara set before. It's because it includes this card:
Ichiro Suzuki had rookie cards in three 1993 sets - BBM, Tomy and Takara. This was the only one of the three that I didn't have.
Obviously the Ichiro card was the main attraction of the set but here's a couple of the other cards:
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| Yasuo Fujii |
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| Shigetoshi Hasegawa |
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| Satoshi Nakajima |
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| So Taguchi |
3 comments:
Sweet purchase! That's the only 1993 Ichiro I need to. Kinda want to find a set too... now that I know there's a Fujii in it.
That is a pretty great deal at 39$
I share your opinion on the Takara sets. I have a small collection of them from various years from the 90s, mostly cheaper ones. Like you I just find the older ones to be too boring in appearance to be worth collecting, with the mug shots that only take up about half the card. There is a pretty active market here for the early ones though, I've seen some selling for really high prices on Yahoo Auctions (though I don't follow them closely enough to have a good sense of which sets are the rarest/most sought after).
@Fuji - I thought of you when I picked out that card :-)
@Sean - the best thing that can be said about the cards from 1990 and earlier is they include players who aren't in Calbee's sets for whatever reason. The best example of this is the Hideo Nomo in the 1990 Buffaloes set along with the 1981-84 Lotte sets (since Calbee didn't regularly include Orion players until 1985). I doesn't surprise me that the early sets are popular since they seem to be pretty rare. On the other hand given how many I see on Ebay I think the 1988-91 sets must have been printed in the millions.
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