One of these is not like the other...

During the offseason, there are far fewer baseball releases in Japan than the US. And those US releases are just too expensive to get my hands on anyway. So I use this time of year to focus on older cards and my non-sports collections.

It is getting pretty difficult to find new Yuko Ogura cards at affordable prices, but a YJA seller recently listed a handful of relics from a set I'm building.

The relic set is nine cards, and the following three cards came from that relic set.

 At first glance, you might think these two are the same card number. The photo is the same, of course. Sure, the fabric color is different. Look a little closer at the top, and the serial numbering is a little different. And if you look at the lower-right corner, you'll see that the pieces came from different parts of the costume. The card on the left, numbered to 1000, comes from the lower half of Yuko's shirt, while the right-hand card, numbered to 1200, is from the skirt. The top part of the shirt is already in collection; in fact, I have both white and blue fabric swatches for the first card.

The final card, also numbered to 1000, is from a yukata. This particular card is from the bottom third of the yukata.

Those of you who are actually thinking about this have already figured out that with nine costume cards and each costume card taking a third of the fabric, there are three costumes used for this set. And when I finally finish it, you'll get to see the third, and all of the cards I have for this set together.

Oh, and the backs form three-card puzzles. That's pretty cool.