I have been the recipient of a couple random acts of kindness this week. I don't know what I've done to deserve the generosity of a couple of my internet friends, especially since I've never met either of them in person, but I'm very grateful to them.
On Monday, I received an envelope from Jason of JK's Card Shoppe that contained eight cards from this year's BBM 1st Version set. Jason knows that I'm fond of the "secret version" image variations so he sent me four of them along with the original versions of each card:
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #141 |
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #141 Secret Version |
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #264 |
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #264 Secret Version |
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #126 |
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #126 Secret Version |
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #010 |
 |
| 2025 BBM 1st Version #010 Secret Version |
It's nice to see that BBM is still putting out what I consider the best looking sets for NPB.
Today I received an envelope that was similar to several others I had received over the past few months. Once again, I had been Zippy Zapped! Kenny was kind enough to send me six cards from the new Calbee Series One set. I'm guessing, based on a comment he left on a post by Sean about the set, Kenny had bought three bags of chips to use in miso soup and sent me the cards.
If you go to that post, you can see a comment I left, talking about what the cards look like. The front of the cards look very much like last year's cards which is a bit surprising. Calbee's been alternating having the player names in Japanese and English for the past eight or nine years with the names being in English in odd numbered years and Japanese in even numbered years. They broke that tradition this year, though, as the player names are again in Japanese. There's two differences from last year's fronts that I can see. The first is that the text of the team name between the team logo and the player's name is in Japanese while last year it was in English. The second is that for the first time since 1998(!), the card number is not on the front of the "regular" player cards*.
There's also a pretty major design change on the back - the card number is now on the lower left instead of the upper right. Just kind of eyeballing things, I think the only times in Calbee's history that that card numbers haven't been in the upper right on the back were the 1973 and 1973/74 sets (not including the very confusing 1978 and 1979 sets which didn't have card numbers at all). Probably not a design change that anyone was looking for but don't let it be said that Calbee's afraid to mix things up every 50 years or so.
* Regular player cards in the flagship sets
Here are the cards Kenny sent me:
 |
| 2025 Calbee Series One #042 Gregory Polanco |
 |
| 2025 Calbee Series One #031 Taisei Makihara |
 |
| 2025 Calbee Series One #035 Yuki Matsumoto |
 |
| 2025 Calbee Series One #052 Ryoma Nishikawa |
 |
| 2025 Calbee Series One #049 Masaru Fujii |
 |
| 2025 Calbee Series One #048 Takayuki Kishi |
So thank you Jason and Kenny for the unexpected treats!
4 comments:
I've since opened several more packs and got several more Nishikawas.
I appreciate the one you sent!
I'm finding myself liking BBMs designs even though they all kind of look the same to me. Very very happy they have the year on the fronts too.
BBM's almost always had the nicest looking NPB sets and their flagship sets have always had the year on the front somewhere. This is actually the first time since probably 1998 that Calbee doesn't have the year on the front with the card number.
Post a Comment