Japanese Type Collection: A Big Small Card

Maintaining a type collection is not that unsimilar from set building. In fact, it's pretty similar to today's Topps flagship.

Seriously, hear me out. When you start building flagship, pack by pack, you need every card you get your hands on. There are lots of cheap cards to help you get closer to your goal, and even as you start coming across cards you already have, there are always new, affordable cards at the shop or card shows.

Now, if you're building just a base set, there may be one or two more-challenging cards. Say, the Aaron Judge rookie. But it's not impossible to find. But you decided to collect all the SPs, too. And the inserts. And relics and autographs.

So you chug along, and things get more and more difficult, but you come across bargain autos, or you find an SP you've been looking for. You feel pretty good working on the inserts, and then Series 2 hits shelves. So you're still working on the nooks and crannies of Series 1 while starting the battle again with Series 2.

And on and on it goes until Update comes out. And again, you can get the base set out of the way fairly quickly, and the inserts aren't so tough, but the parallels and hits always leave you wanting more. And there's always that SP that shouldn't be elusive, but is.

Well, that's my Japanese type collection. Except I didn't start collecting until Update hit shelves, leaving me scrambling for the prior series.

At this point, I have most, if not all, base sets covered. I'm probably missing some subsets, but eventually I'll go back and sort that out. Inserts aren't so tough, either, usually, though older ones can be a challenge to even locate. And you can pretty much forget about the hits, though I do have a small handful of them.

Of course, every month, something new hits shelves. And it's time to scramble again. But now I'm trying to go back and fill in the holes. And the biggest hole until recently was a 1991 BBM Hologram.

Probably inspired by Upper Deck's team holograms, BBM, decided to issue team logo cards in hologram form as part of the base set. But since holograms are more expensive to make than regular cards, these are pretty limited, and generally cost about 20 times more than a base card. They are numbered as part of the regular set.

In 1991 and 1993, BBM used team logos, but for 1992 they made holograms of players. And 1994's set included player holograms as well, but these weren't numbered as part of the regular set. As much as I'd love to have full sets of all the holograms, it's out of my price range. Though I did build the 1993 set for my collection.

With this hologram, I now have a complete BBM type collection for 1991-1994, and I'm missing only one 1995 card. And, 1996 is complete!