This post is going to feature a couple of things that I rarely do. The first is that I rarely post about something I've picked up on Ebay on the day I receive it. The second is that the item in question is a Takara set, something I rarely buy anymore.
If you're not familiar with them (and even if you are), a Takara set is a collectible card game set featuring 30 cards for one particular team. Takara issued these sets between 1978 to 1998. They only did the six Central League teams their first three years but expanded to do all 12 NPB teams starting in 1981.
I had a long-ish discussion about Takara sets about six months ago with Dan over Facebook Messenger in which I expressed that I was pretty much burned out on Takara sets. I felt that the ones from 1991 and later are somewhat redundant since BBM's sets feature most of the same players and while the earlier ones feature players who may not have appeared on other cards in the year of issue, the photos are all "mug shots" so they're kind of boring. I've picked up a handful of single cards in recent years, mostly from the late 1970's and early to mid 1980's, but I can't remember the last time I bought a complete 30 card team set. But I saw this available as a $39 "Buy-It-Now" on Ebay last week and decided to get it:
The year and the team may tell you why I was interested in picking this set up, even though I don't think I've EVER spent that much on a Takara set before. It's because it includes this card:
Ichiro Suzuki had rookie cards in three 1993 sets - BBM, Tomy and Takara. This was the only one of the three that I didn't have.
Obviously the Ichiro card was the main attraction of the set but here's a couple of the other cards:
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| Yasuo Fujii |
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| Shigetoshi Hasegawa |
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| Satoshi Nakajima |
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| So Taguchi |