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.