A Brief History Of NPB Collectible Card Games - Part 3 - Future Bee, Bandai and Bushiroad

I'm finally getting around to finishing off this series of posts.  I devoted earlier posts to Takara and Konami.  This one deals with the other three "modern" game - Power League from Future Bee (or CollecCarA), Owners League from Bandai and DreamOrder from Bushiroad.

Future Bee 2000-2001

A company called "Collection Card Assortment" or "CollecCarA" issued cards under the "Future Bee" label from 1998 to 2001.  Their cards were team sets for the Baystars, Swallows and Marines but they also did a collectible card game set called "Power League" in 2000 and 2001 that included all twelve teams.  There were two sets in 2000 - "Dream Stadium" which had a 252 card base set and "UL 2000" which only had 195 cards (including three checklists which is why it's not evenly divisible by 12).  Both sets had "Super Rare" inserts and the "UL 2000" set also had an insert set for the statistical leaders and award winners for the 2000 season.  I only have base set and "Super Rare" cards from the Dream Stadium set:

2000 Power League Dream Stadium #220

2000 Power League Dream Stadium Super Rare #S006

Their single set in 2001 was again called "Dream Stadium" and again had 252 player cards but they added two unnumbered checklists so that the total number of cards in the base set was 254.  Unlike the 2000 version, it was issued in two series. It had three insert sets - half of each insert set was released in each series - "Nostalgic" (featuring OB players including Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima), "Current Player" and "Best Performers".  These are the only two cards I have from this set:

2001 Power League Dream Stadium #072

2001 Power League Dream Stadium Current Player #S-59

I don't know how the game was played but there was player information on both sides of the card so I don't think it involved hiding which players you were using from your opponent.

Bandai 2010-2015

Bandai's CCG cards were issued under the name "Owners League".  Compared to Konami, Bandai's releases were fairly straight-forward.  For the most part, there were four releases each year - Owners League 01, Owners League 02, Owners League 03 and Owners League 04.  Each year's sets shared the same design but were numbered separately so they shouldn't be considered separate "series" the way that Topps' or Calbee's releases are.

While the number of Owners League sets were less confusing than Konami's, the content of those sets was kind of bewildering.  The base set for each set contained five or six different types of cards, from the common "Normal (B)" and "Normal (W)" cards (with the "B" and "W" standing for "Black" and "White" respectively) to the short-printed cards labelled variously "Star", "New Star", "Superstar", "Infinity", "Clutch", "Boost" and "Great".  Some of the sets also had related insert sets of "Idol" (mascots) and "Legend" (OB players).  

I've never tried to complete one of the sets but I imagine the large number of short prints would make it difficult.  For example, the 2011 Owners League 04 set (which I bought a box of a while back) had a base set of 132 cards but 48 of those were short-prints - 12 "Great" cards, 12 "Super Star" cards and 24 "Star" cards.  

Here's an example base card from each year the sets were issued:

2010 Bandai Owners League 04 #088

2011 Bandai Owners League 02 #022

2012 Bandai Owners League 03 #102

2013 Bandai Owners League 04 #070

2014 Bandai Owners League 04 #053

2015 Bandai Owners League 01 #009 (Shohei Ohtani)

The cards were used in some sort of online baseball game.  The card backs have a unique code that could be entered at the game's website and used somehow. 

It was kind of interesting (and infuriating) how they identified the set that a card was from on its back.  Before the card number, they'd list "OL##" where "##" was the number of the set.  But they didn't restart this count each year - the number was from 2010.  What I mean by this is that all the cards in the 2011 Owners League 01 set had "OL05" on the back, while all of that year's Owners League 02 set had "OL06".  They continued this all the way through to Owners League 04 in 2015 which was "OL24".  This forced you to do some modulo arithmetic to determine which set the card was actually from.

2015 Bandai Owners League 04 #084 (Seiya Suzuki)

Bandai added a fifth set in 2014 called "Owners League Masters".  Actually to be completely honest, I suspect that this set was first added in 2012 as the card numbers of the 2014 cards (which are the only ones I've seen) have a prefix of "OLM03" which implies that they were the third "Masters" set.

This set was entirely made up of OB players but there was a twist - all the players featured in the set were on the coaching staff for one of the twelve NPB teams that year - although the cards showed them as active players and they may not have played for the teams they were coaching for.

2014 Bandai Owners League Masters #056 (Yutaka Nakamura)

I think these are my favorites of all the post-Takara CCG sets.  I especially like the "04" sets from each year as they have cards of players who either signed late in the season or were traded and did not appear in any other card sets that year.  My favorite example of this is from the afore-mentioned 2011 Owners League 04 set.  Long time Chiba Lotte Marines player Saburo Ohmura (whose registered name with Lotte was just "Saburo") was traded to the Yomiuri Giants at the end of June that year.  The trade was after the cut off for BBM's 2nd Version set and BBM had not started doing the Fusion set, so there would not be any BBM cards of him with the Giants that year.  Similarly, he didn't appear in Calbee's Series Three set.  He returned to Lotte as a free agent in the off season so his 2012 cards all show him with the Marines.  The only contemporary card of him as a Giant that I am aware of is from the 2011 Owners League 04 set (Fun fact - his registered name with the Giants was his full name which is reflected on this card):

2011 Bandai Owners League 04 #093

Bushiroad 2024-

Ryan had pointed out to me at some point that the card market in Japan has historically treated the game cards separately from the "regular" baseball cards (i.e. Calbee, BBM, Epoch, etc).  As a result, most of the baseball card shops in Japan don't tend to stock the game cards very much, at least in the post-Takara era.  I think I've seen more Takara cards in card shops than I've seen Konami, Power League or Bandai cards - off hand the only place I remember getting any Konami cards was Mint Odawara where I got a handful of 2018 Baseball Collection cards.  This dichotomy has contributed to my ignorance about these sets - since Jambalaya doesn't stock them, I haven't been seeing them.

Bushiroad, however, appears to be pushing a different strategy.  They debuted their collectible card game cards, DreamOrder, last year with a big marketing campaign that included getting Mint on board with them.  I saw their cards (and their advertising) in several Mint stores and, most importantly for my ability to track them, Jambalaya has been listing their sets as well.

There's been about 34 distinct DreamOrder sets so far.  They started out last year with a "Starter Deck" set for each of the 12 teams.  These sets included three copies each of 12 unique player cards along with some game play cards.  They then issued four separate "Booster Pack" sets for each league - Vol. 1 came out in April with the "Starter Deck" sets and the remaining sets came out in two month increments - Vol. 2 in June, Vol. 3 in August and Vol. 4 in October.  They've issued a "Booster Pack" for each of the 12 teams this year which have included OB players as well as active ones.  They've also issued a Samurai Japan set and a "Heroes Of 2025" set.

DreamOrder is a table top card game rather than an on-line game, the first such game for NPB since the Konami Field Of 9 cards in 2005.  The card backs are all identical so I assume the players hide what they have available until the cards are played.

I don't have a lot of these cards and the ones that I have are either "regular" player cards or "Tactic" cards.  The "Tactic" cards don't identify the players on them but I've felt that they've featured more interesting photos than the "regular" cards.  Some of the "regular" player cards have "holo" or "kira" finishes or gold text indicating that they're more rare and powerful cards but I don't think these are parallels.  There ARE parallels available in the team "Booster Packs" from this year but I think the cards use a different design rather than the foil/holo stuff.

Here's some examples:

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Dragons Starter Deck #CSD06-D03 (Raidel Martinez)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Lions Starter Deck #PSD05-L01 (Sosuke Genda)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Central League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #CBP01-DB10 (Keita Sano)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #PBP01-E12 (Hiroaki Shimauchi) 

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 #PDO-01 

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 #PDO-06 (Takeya Nakamura)

The last two cards are "Tactics" cards.  There's nothing on the cards that identify the players on the cards and I don't know who the Fighters pitcher is.