First Set Completion in Years

 Even during the height of my collecting days in this hobby I was never a set collector. Reason being that I was never willing devote the time, space and money necessary to build them. I usually just appreciate set collecting by seeing actual set collectors like Night Owl Cards build sets and merely following along on their journey via their blogposts.

But then came along a small compact set that I actually wanted to build.

Enter the Hololive x Pacific League collaboration card set from 2021.

Hololive Production is a Japanese VTuber (virtual YouTuber) agency. If you don't know what a VTuber is, it's a YouTuber/online streamer that uses a virtual CG model/avatar instead of showing their real face. Think of it more like they're playing a character in real time. It's niche form of online entertainment that got popular in Japan and has gotten even more popular around the world since 2020. Today you can find VTubers from basically every country and every language. Some of them are signed to companies like Hololive, but usually a lot of them are independent.

(Source)

It's at least gotten big enough that the Pacific League had a "Hololive Day" promotion at the Orix Buffaloes ballpark back in 10/3/2021 (Press Release). The company's CEO Yagoo even threw the first pitch. More importantly there was a bunch of stuff you could buy.

Japan is just as ruthless as America is at trying to make money off of merchandise when they have a popular intellectual property on their hands so the characters who were a part of this promo were plastered on a lot of things. Towels, keychains, pins, tapestry wall art, acrylic stand figures, folders, and possibly other items I didn't look hard enough to find.

The most important thing for me were the cards. As far as I can tell these were sold along with potato chips (Calbee style!) but I couldn't 100% confirm that.

There were two girls per Pacific League team and the set as a whole had only 12 cards because of it. Works for me!

You can see the back of the cards at the top of this post (they're all the same).

As for the fronts.

Shishiro Botan

Shirakami Fubuki

Uruha Rushia

Aki Rosenthal

Usada Pekora

Tokoyami Towa

Inugami Korone

Amane Kanata

Oozora Subaru

Houshou Marine

Natsuiro Matsuri

Shirogane Noel

The scans didn't pick up on it but these cards are pretty shiny and have a little refraction action (as Gavin would say) going on which is pretty sweet considering these aren't chrome cards. The downside to that is that whatever is being used to make them shiny is also warping them a bit. I had to put them all into a binder page in a hurry after these scans were taken.

These aren't all of the talents signed to Hololive (in fact the company would introduce more since the set was released) but pretty much all 12 here are really popular. If I had to guess they all probably have about 1 million subscribers on YouTube on their individual channels.

My personal "oshi" (read: favorite) from that lot and from Hololive in general is Shirogane Noel.

This isn't part of the 12 card set, I'm just showing this because I like this card too

For two large reasons.

But my degeneracy aside, this set being 12 cards and full of cute anime girls wearing NPB gear is pretty much why I decided to build it.

That plus I lucked into a 11 card lot and only needed one more to finish it. The last card I needed was Uruha Rushia, which didn't surprise me one bit considering she's the only former Hololive talent seen here and with that comes the notoriety tax (I paid more for her card than the rest combined).

But whatever, bam! The first set I'd completed since... I don't know, the Card Gen set?

Now one last note I'd like to end this post on is that some NPB savvy folks might be wondering, "Why is this just the Pacific League? Doesn't Japan also have the Central League?".

My understanding is that while the Pacific and Central Leagues make up the NPB, the two leagues operate differently and mostly independent of each other. The best example of this is how all six Pacific Leagues teams joined together to operate the Pacific League TV network where they all equally share the revenue they make off of that broadcast subscription service. Something the Central League teams can't do because they individually have big extremely tight and long commitments with their own local regional TV networks.

So usually the Pacific League is better and faster at getting something done as a collective unit. Though the Central League is unified to a certain extent since they'd also do collaborations with another VTuber agency Nijisanji in 2022. Plus I think this was also a timing thing since this promo was in October.

Still, really fun to build a fun small set again. While I wouldn't mind it if my set building endeavors ended here for a while, hopefully though there will be a lot more promos like this one in the future. Who knows, maybe we might even see Mori Calliope in Yankee pinstripes one day. We can only hope.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.