Two in the Upper Deck

Upper Deck seems to be willing to try anything, and they definitely poked around the Japanese card market a lot around the year 2000. I believe it started with the 1999 MRM set for the 2000 Japan Olympic Team, and in 2000 proper they issued a couple NPB sets. They repeated the process in 2001 before pulling out for whatever reason. Perhaps three major companies (BBM, Calbee, and Upper Deck) were too much for the Japanese market. Or perhaps Upper Deck's cards just weren't a good fit. They did market a few card sets over the next decade here - the Yunker Ichiro set I posted about recently, Kellogg's MLB cards, and the 2009 CardGen gaming set. After the loss of their MLB license, Topps has issued MLB cards in Japan from time to time.

Collecting CardGen is no easy feat, but I've been after the other Upper Deck issues, especially the 2000 and 2001 sets. I'm getting down to just the tougher inserts, especially of the stars. I got a couple nice ones recently:

 Dice-K (Daisuke Matsuzawa) is not a top-tier player, but he certainly commands a premium. This is from the Ovation insert set called Oendan Favorites.

And one of the true "key" cards in the set, though it didn't scan well. Here's Ichiro in his Standing Ovation insert card.

I'm currently at 127 sets on the Japan set want list. Can I get 27 of those off the list in the next six months? We'll see...