Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

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Monday, July 28, 2014

Tokyo Summer Card Festa! 2014 Review: The Promos and an Oddball

I mentioned that the big Tokyo card show was coming and, well, it came last week. I had a good sized budget, but I could have spent even more! While I had a few "large quantity" purchases, I bought several cards that ran me a few bucks each. That makes the money go pretty quick!
 But under the "cheap" label, I found a couple boxes of dime cards. There were plenty of Panini World Cup cards in there, but I grabbed a bunch of MLB cards that I'll show later. But I will share with you this one single from the (new?) Star Wars chrome release - I picked up a bunch of singles from many of the different subsets in this issue. I don't really know much about it, but I enjoyed taking a look at the cards and adding a few to my collection.
 As usual, a few promos were handed out at the door. The first was this advertisement for trading card supplies from Epoch. It gives you a pretty good idea of what plastic supplies cost in Japan. Cardboard box prices are outrageous!
 The newest release as of last week was an Epoch JBPA issue celebrating the organization's 20th anniversary. It's a black bordered set, and so is the promo (TFT-1), so the card's borders got cropped by my scanner. I'll have more on this set later.
Finally, this "Reservation Privilage" (sic) promo for an upcoming women's volleyball set. This is card "H" and it looked like they were handing out one of the nine cards to everyone. There have been two sets in the past several months for women's volleyball and they have been pretty popular.

As for the show itself, they had the same basic layout as last year's events, with a large number of Mint dealers and a few other card stores represented. Most of them are from the Tokyo area but at least one came from Osaka.

Generally, the stores offer a small discount on unopened product and normal prices on most cards, though many tables have a "bargain" box of some kind; some had the equivalent of dollar boxes while others had 50% off boxes.

NPB product is the most heavily represented, followed by soccer and MLB products. Other sports made appearances too, though. Dealers tend to bring a good selection of high-dollar cards and singles of base cards and inserts from the most recent sets. A few dealers had good Calbee representation; you'll see some Calbee in a future post.

More coming soon!

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