Two weekends ago, I made my usual long routine trip, stopping in Akihabara, Kanda, and Takadanobaba. Yes, those names mean pretty much nothing to you. But Akihabara gives me the cheap autograph and other "hit" singles (below), Kanda provides me with US cards (like Martinez above, and the Tribute cards I posted a couple days ago) and occasional box sets, and Takadanobaba is my go-to shop for pretty much everything else.
A couple "Photo" cards. These are just cards with frames and low serial numbering. I'm not sure why these things are so valuable.
BBM's autographs are usually stickers. But they are relatively invisible on the cards.
Another photo card to finish the Akihabara purchase...
The last stop was, of course, Takadanobaba. After slowly going through about 100 5000-count boxes of cards for base set cards for my type collection, I've been slowly going through a couple dozen binders of inserts for my type collection. Some of these sets are ones I'm not aware of, especially when it comes to "limited editions" or stadium/event promos.
Here's an older Soul of Carp insert. As I mentioned yesterday, the insert title has been reused several times.
Plenty of regular inserts, though. I'm not sure what exactly the Buffaloes card is and I haven't tried translating it.
Promos!
Promos!
Promos! That Cross Blaze has a refactory foil background.
One of these has a matrix refractor style to it.
Promos and parallels. The most irritating BBM cards in existence, mainly because they're mostly uncatalogued in English.
Inserts
I should have paid more attention; I think these might be from the same set, with the coloring difference due to the different leagues.
Inserts.
Promos.
I try to skim through the current-year binder every time I visit, as various promos get added throughout the season. I found two First Edition promos of the four known sets. Now I just need to find those two insert-based promo sets.
I've updated the 1st Version post with these images too.
Also, as I posted yesterday, BBM is apparently issuing 9-card promo sets for at least some of the team sets. Here is the Buffaloes promo. I've updated the Buffaloes set page.
I picked up a few more cards last weekend. But I also need to post my Calbee progress! Hopefully I can do that tomorrow.
>Two weekends ago, I made my usual long routine trip, stopping in Akihabara, Kanda, and Takadanobaba. Yes, those names mean pretty much nothing to you.
ReplyDeleteOh, no, they mean a lot to me. They mean I'm jealous! Throw Ikebukuro in and I'd be extremely jealous! :-)
I think you're one of a very select group of readers who are familiar with those stores! Despite changing trains in Ikebukuro, I didn't make it to the stores there on that trip. I did go last weekend, though, and I'm getting near posting those cards.
DeleteI have somewhat-bad news for card shoppers, though. It looks like Mint raised its singles prices to 60 yen at all of its locations. It's gone from overpriced to gouging for most singles at this point. The Takadanobaba store still seems to be charging 30 yen each. And the Akihabara Mint/Yellow Submarine still has lots of cards priced at 30 yen, but the new cards are now 40 yen and up. 10 yen is a 20-33% increase! The tax rate went up 3% and that might be some of the reasoning, possibly covering the prior 5% increase too. But that should mean a 5 yen (10%) increase at most...
Those are some pretty sweet autos! The cards designs look nice too and looks like they had some process on them.
ReplyDeletethought process
DeleteI like the BBM autograph card designs. Actually, most of Topps' autograph cards look decent to me. The benefit here is that BBM uses the designs only for the autographs, where Topps just covers up the autograph area with a logo or something on insert cards. There is no dual-purpose and that makes them more special!
DeleteLet me note again that BBM almost never does on-card autographs, instead using stickers.