New Discovery: 2014 Bikkuriman All-Stars 30th Anniversary

I've talked a bit about Bikkuriman in the past, and lately they've been in the front of my mind. One of my goals this year is to knock some Japanese sets off my want lists, and there are a handful of Bikkuriman baseball sets there.

Bikkurimans are (usually) square stickers, small in size, They've existed for about 30 years now, and are known now for the cartoon drawings found on the front. There's an entire history around them, but I'm not interested in talking about that now.

Those sets follow a simple numbering scheme, numbered based on the league, 1-12 (for the 24-card 2006 set) or 1-18 (for the 36-card 2007 and 2008 sets). And many of Bikkuriman's special sets have been numbered straight through; the three series of Star Wars sets issued last fall were each numbered 1-24.

But standard Bikkuriman sets follow a different scheme, where each card number exists in three different types in a battle of sorts. The 30th Anniversary "All Star" set has 30 stickers, numbered 1-10 for each of the three types. For whatever reason, they decided to include Tomoya Satozaki, who would then retire at the end of 2014.

He is card #9 and #10 in the set. Card 9 has cartoon characters in "Satozaki Stadium".

 If you look closely at the card number's suffix, the kanji is different on the three cards. The backs have some sort of hand-written message and a background of Satozaki's jersey.

 I have seen special all-foil versions of these cards, but the backgrounds on the fronts are gone and the backs have changed, so I don't include them in the "full" baseball set.

 Card #10 uses a pinstripe background and a small "jersey" with Satozaki's name, number, and the Marines logo.

 The backs of these cards have facsimile autographs. This character's name is "Super Zeus."

 This is "Black Zeus." Which is why he looks much like the other guy.

These six cards are all of the "baseball" cards in the set. The remainder are standard Bikkuriman stickers.

My recent renewed interest in Bikkuriman led me to do some research, and I've "discovered" a few other sets that seem to be really rare. Whether I pursue those or not remains to be seen; I'd like to have at least a single card for my type collection from each of them. I'll talk about them at some point in the future.

Review: 2014 Frontier Chiba Lotte Marines Mizuno

Spend enough time in Japan (a day, if you're observant enough) and you'll random Xs. What does that mean? It's a cross-promotion. So at the gift shop, you might find Hello Kitty dressed up as One Piece characters. Check the package, and you should see "Hello Kitty x One Piece" somewhere.

Frontier issued two team box sets late last year showing collaborations between Mizuno and the Hiroshima Carp and the Chiba Lotte Marines.

Like the Carp set, a fancy black crown design at the bottom of the front has the player's jersey number, position, and name. The team and Mizuno logos appear on the photo on both the front and back. The back photo has a small box around a particular piece of Mizuno sporting goods the player is wearing or using.

There are 15 cards in the base set, and some players can have multiple cards if they provided multiple pieces of equipment. Each box came with two special cards, which could be from any of the options below. Boxes included either one relic and one autograph, or two relics.

• Rookie autograph (one card with base design, #16): black ink 29 copies, red ink 10 copies
• Authentic Signatures
• two types; yellow background (6 players) and grey background (7 players)
• each type has black ink signatures (30-35 copies) and red ink signatures (10-15 copies)
• Game Used Equipment
• Level 1 (undershirt): 4 players, 125 copies each
• Level 2 (signed undershirt): 4 players, 3-5 copies each
• Level 2 (signed spikes): 3 players, 2 copies each
• Bats: 2 players, 35 copies each
• Signed Bats: 2 players, 5 copies each

I bought a full Carp base set because I like the concept of highlighting something different (the equipment in this case). Also, the design of the regular cards isn't ugly. I have not yet picked up a Marines set, though I might eventually. Unfortunately, this is one in a long line of "high end" products which is flooding the market with hits. Hopefully things don't get too out of hand like has happened in the US.

Greatness from Steve M - Part 4, The Finale

You know the saying. Good things come in small packages. That's certainly true for many things, though I'm not sure Steve's package could be called "small" - it was a 200-count box packed with great cards. Okay, maybe he could have forked over a small fortune to send me a monster box filled with 1993 Finest Refractors, or sent over a shipping container overflowing with low-numbered parallels. But on the other hand, one or two cards is small. And I digress.

 There was quite a large number of cards in the box, all of them great, but I was most happy to see the smaller-sized cards. The throwback minis Topps inserted into its packs over the past few years have slowly grown on me, and I've been gradually building the sets, picking up cards here and there whenever I can get them at a reasonable price. But the 1989s from 2014 (does that make sense to anyone?) have been fairly elusive. Steve found a mass of them, though.

 The 1989s might be my favorite of the throwback minis. 1989 was the year I started collecting, so the relatively simple design has a lot of nostalgia.

 This is also the only year that were die-cut. That gives them just a tiny edge over the others.

 One thing I've noticed about these minis is that the photos are very similar in style to the original 1989s. Lots of not-quite action shots to avoid blur, and plenty of posed shots.

 As far as action shots go, those three show about the least amount of action you can get from the field.

 How cool would it have been if Topps had called him Rock Raines again?

 "Pudge" Rodriguez doesn't look so pudgy there.

 Compare "Pudge" to Prince. Then you'll see what I mean.

 I think the cards from this point on are from Update. Or at least Series 2. Topps used a whole bunch of Spring Training shots later on in the set. That screams 1980s Topps.

 Double Bryce. Twice as nice?

 Nothing says multi-million dollar MLB player like a chain link fence and a bush.

 I bet some of these pictures were taken specifically for sets like Heritage, Archives, and this set in mind.

 Were all the Yankees active player photos taken at Yankee Stadium in posed shots?

 Joey Votto's picture looks like it was taken late in the afternoon. That's pretty cool, if you ask me.

 The only thing these cards are missing are cars parked in the background.

 When Troy grows up, he wants to be 6'7"!

 Another active Yankee, another empty stadium.

And that wraps up the massive mini menagerie. Mail day is rare, and these cards are totally appreciated! Thank you very much Steve. Hopefully I can get some great stuff going your way again soon! ありがとうございます！