And Then There Was One

I did a post a couple months back reporting that I had narrowed the number of cards I was missing from a full run of BBM's "flagship" sets down to three.  Twycchang, a card collector in Taiwan who's been extraordinarily helpful to me, left a comment with links to auctions for all three cards, two of them on Mercari and the other on a Taiwanese site.  I asked Ryan to grab the two cards on Mercari and took twycchang up on his offer to pick up the other card.  As it worked out, Ryan was only able to get one of the cards as the other auction was basically a zombie auction - the seller never responded to the attempt to buy it (I'm kind of over-simplifying here as twycchang was the one who actually tried to buy it after Ryan declined to as he correctly judged that it was going to be futile).  So I'm now down to only needing one card to complete my run - #642 from the 1996 set (Yonetoshi Kawamata), although there's nine cards that I "have" but I don't physically have - they'll be coming from Japan in the next package Ryan sends me.

I received the card that twycchang picked up for me yesterday.  It's a card that I didn't even know existed until last fall - Checklist #13 from the 1996 set (card #656).  This is kind of a weird card to be honest as it's for the "Late Series" cards that year.  If you're not familiar with BBM's "Late Series" cards (and even if you are), in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000 and 2001 BBM essentially ran a second printing of their flagship set and replaced all the cards for a team (or two) with new cards that were added to the end of the set.  For example, in 1994 the first printing was numbered 1-566 with the first 42 cards being for the champion Swallows.  The second printing replaced cards 1-42 with cards 567-608.  

BBM's "Late Series" in 1996 updated all the cards for the Dragons, including the team checklist, AND added the new checklist card.  1996 was the last year that BBM did separate checklists for the entire set - after that the team checklists covered the bulk of the set with maybe one additional checklist card to handle the inserts and memorabilia cards.  There were 12 checklist cards that covered the original 613 cards in the first printing of the set.  Each checklist card covered 52 cards except for the final one which only listed 41 cards (#573 to 613).  They looked like this:

The new checklist card covers all the "Late Series" cards - #614 to #656.  What I find weird about this is that there's really no reason for this card to exist since all the cards in the late Series are listed on the back of the new Dragons team checklist card except the two checklist cards!  Here's the backs of the two checklist cards side by side to show what I mean:

The team checklist (#655) is on the left and checklist #13 (#656) is on the right.  I can't help feeling that if they'd simply listed the team checklist card on the team checklist card they could have skipped checklist #13 altogether.  

As far as I can tell, they did not issue a separate checklist card for the 1994 "Late Series" cards and the new Swallows team card did not list itself.  BBM did issue a separate checklist card for the 1995 "Late Series" cards which makes sense as there were five "new" cards with that printing that were not just updates of the Marines cards.  By 1999, the next time they issued a "Late Series", BBM's team checklists included themselves on them so there was no need for any separate checklists for the "Late Series" cards.

The other kind of weird thing about the card is that the entire checklist appears on the back of the card which leaves the front seeming a bit empty:

Regardless of the weirdness, it's a card I needed to complete the 1996 set and I thank twycchang for picking it up for me (after letting me know it existed!)