Trying To Make Sense Of The 2017 AIAIO JWBL Cards

A little while ago I did a post about some Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) cards that Ryan had sent me.  This included both a 2011 BBM card from when the league was still called the Girls Professional Baseball League (GPBL) as well as some 2017 cards from an outfit called AIAIO.  Jason had made a request about scans of the backs of the cards as well as asking if the 2017 cards were sold as team sets or a league wide set.  I thought I'd try to tackle the 2017 cards now and maybe do a post later this week on the 2011 cards.

AIAIO is kind of strange outfit.  They did cards for the JWBL between 2013 to 2019 - if not longer - and have done cards for the independent team the Hyogo Blue Sandars and the Kobe Sanda Bravers (same team with different names).  But they also will print cards for your little league team or even just for you.  (What's really cool is that they have a deal with Calbee to put their logo on the cards they print - for a price - so you can get AIAIO to print your very own Calbee card for you.)

Their website used to have a page with information about their JWBL cards but since the league folded after the 2020 season, that page no longer exists.  Luckily though there's a number of iterations of the page that got saved in the Wayback Machine for the Internet Archive so we can still glean some information from there.

If we look at the 2017 cards (or at least as many of them as got preserved), we see something kind of interesting - there appear to be three different card designs in use.  The cards for Saitama and Hyogo seem to be using the same design but the cards for Kyoto and Reia are using something different.  The designs Kyoto and Reia are using are similar to each other but clearly not the same.  Now what's odd here is that I have eight different 2017 AIAIO JWBL cards and only two of them show up on this webpage.  Here's the front and back of them:

What sticks out here is that while the fronts have different designs, the backs appear to use the same one.  The thing I'm curious about here is the numbers on the top left of the backs - F17-03-01 on Miura's card and A17-16-01.  I think the first three characters (F17 and A17) indicates the team and the year (Flora and Astraia) respectively and the next two characters (03 and 16) are obviously their uniform numbers.  I'm not sure what the "01" is on both cards but I have a theory which I'll get to in a minute.  

What I really don't understand is what the numbers on the top right mean.  The text in front of the numbers is just AIAIO in katakana although weirdly enough it's actually spelled as EIEIO like Old MacDonald - エイエイオ (エ is "E", イis "I" and オ is "O").  To be completely accurate, it says something like "EIEIO Card No,"

Let me show the fronts and backs of four more cards that possibly may shine some light on what that "01" is for on the card number:

At first glance these cards look like they may be from two different sets.  The two Kyoto Flora cards and the Saitama Astraia card are using the same design but the Hyogo Dione card is using a different design.  All four backs look like the have the same design though.  You'll notice that the card numbers in the upper left on the back all have "02" on them instead of "01".  Could this be some sort of second series of cards?  What's odd about that is that you'd expect the "02" cards to be a later issue than the "01" cards but the uniforms the Kyoto players are wearing on the "02" are the ones they wore prior to 2017 and the one the Kyoto players are wearing on the "01" cards (including the ones on the archived website) are the ones from later than 2017.

Oh, I guess I'm assuming that all the cards on the archived website are the "01" versions but I don't know that for sure.  All I've seen of those cards are the two cards that I have plus one that Ryan had blogged about.

I mentioned that I have eight 2017 cards but I've only shown six so far.  Here are the other two:

The first card has an "05" suffix so I guess we can assume there are at least five separate cards for each player?  Ryan just picked up a couple more 2017 AIAIO cards for me - one that uses the same design as the Sato card and one that uses a design I haven't seen before - maybe that one is either "03" or "04".  The last card has no card number so I can't even hazard a guess on that one.

Jason's original question was were these sold as team sets or as a league-wide set (like Epoch's JWBL sets in 2016 and 2018)?  There's something on the bottom of the archived webpage that implies that the entire set could be purchased for 1720 which included tax and shipping.  What's weird though is that they say the set has 48 cards but I count 59 cards on the site - 17 for Kyoto, 16 each for Saitama and Hyogo and 10 for Reia - so maybe this isn't really for this set.  There doesn't seem to be anything on the website where you'd place an order but maybe that didn't get archived.  Ryan has mentioned that he picked up a complete 2015 AIAIO set (and got one for me too) but he hasn't seen complete sets for any other years.  So my answer to Jason is - I don't know.  It might have been sold as a complete set but I'm not convinced it was.  Which leads to the next question - how were the cards sold or distributed?

Ryan posted a while back that he had gotten his first JWBL card given to him when he went to a game in 2013.  I, however, was not given any cards at the game I went to in 2019 so I'm guessing that they stopped doing that.  On the archived website it looks like there's a way to make a custom card of a player with your own photo and then trade the card to the player for one of the player's official cards - Ryan also mentions this in the post I previously cited (where he talked about the 2015 complete set).  Again, I didn't see anything like this going on at the game I went to in 2019 although I might have missed it.  I went through the souvenir stand there though and I didn't see any cards for sale.

I think I've failed at my attempt to make any sense out of these cards but I'm hoping I at least have shown why this appears to be a complex problem.