Miscellaneous Card Pickups

There were nine BBM team sets from between 2003 and 2007 that I was trying to complete.  I had gotten unopened boxes for most of them back in the day and decided a few years ago to get the cards I had missed on them.  I ended up completing six of them (2003 Giants, 2004 Baystars, 2005 Dragons & Swallows, and 2006 Swallows & Tigers) and reducing the number of cards I needed for two of the other sets to two each (2004 Giants & Tigers).  I had only needed one card from the 2007 Tigers set but it eluded me.  I'm not going to show all the cards I got from these sets but here's a single card from each:

I got most of these at either Bits in Nagoya or Mint Hakata in Fukuoka.  I had looked at Quad Sports but didn't find anything on my want list - Ryan eventually pointed out that he had already searched my want list there!

I had compiled a list a few months back of all the guys who had appeared in BBM's high end sets (Diamond Heroes, Touch The Game and Genesis) without having in the same year's flagship set.  I decided that I didn't want to get all the cards on the list but just the ones I found interesting for one reason or another (player I liked, only card for a foreign player, etc).  I don't remember how many cards I had originally decided to get but by the time I left for Japan, there were 23 cards I was still looking for.  Between Bits, Mint Hakata and Mint Odawara, I got all 23 of them.  Here's eight of those, one card from pretty much every set I got cards from:

1996 BBM Diamond Heroes #186

1997 BBM Diamond Heroes #154

1998 BBM Diamond Heroes #60

1999 BBM Diamond Heroes #105

2001 BBM Diamond Heroes #5

2005 BBM Touch The Game #009

2013 BBM Genesis #023

2014 BBM Genesis #048

I've become a big fan of the "Great Record" insert sets from BBM's Fusion sets.  I've gotten the complete insert set with my base set every years since 2019 so I decided to go back and get the ones from 2016 to 2018 as well.  The bulk of these I picked up at Quad Sports along with one or two that I got at Coletre.  I needed 65 of the 72 total cards (24 each year) and I came home with 63 of them.  Here's one card from each set:

The other set that I'm trying to complete is the 1999 BBM Mr. Giants set.  This is a biographical set for Shigeo Nagashima but it includes cards of rival pitchers, teammates and players who he managed as well.  I needed 56 cards - roughly half the set - and I came home with 47 of them (and Ryan has since picked up the other nine for me).  I got most of these at Bits with a couple others at Quad Sports and Mint Hakata.  Here's three of the cards:

The 2012 BBM Fighters team set had a three card subset entitled "Kamagaya Rookies" that included cards of three rookies wearing Nippon-Ham's farm team uniforms.  I've had two of the cards - Go Matsumoto and Takumi Ohshima - for a while but tracking down the last - Kensuke Kondoh - has been difficult.  When I've seen it, it's been much more expensive that I was willing to pay.  Luckily, Mint Hakata had it for a very reasonable price.

The final cards from my want list are ones that Ryan had picked up for me - the last three "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards I needed from the 2021 BBM Fusion set:

The rest of the cards I'm going to show are just ones that I came across that appealed to me.  First up are three "secret version" parallels from the 2020 BBM 30th Anniversary set.  What's interesting about these is instead of being a photo variant, they're "design variants" - they use the same photo as the original card but the card design mirrors the 1991 BBM design instead of the "regular" 30th Anniversary card design.  I picked these up at Mint Urawa:

Back in 2008 and 2009, BBM issued small figurines of players with baseball cards.  I think the figurines only came with the cards in 2009 and they only did them for a handful of the teams.  Deanna shared some photos wth me and I did a post about them way-back-when but I had never seen any in the wild until I was at Bits.  Well, to be entirely accurate, I haven't seen the figurines in the wild but Bits had a couple of lose cards so I picked one up:

The next batch of cards I picked up while happily rummaging through boxes of cards at G-Freak one afternoon.  There's no real rhyme or reason to why I got them, just random cards:

This last card is the only non-BBM card in this post.  It's from a 2018 set that Epoch did in conjunction with "The Museum Of Hanshin Koshien Stadium" called "Footprints Of The Tigers".  I think I picked this up at Mint Odawara: