Good Lots, a Set Collector's Best Friend

 For the second year in a row I was able to luck into a really really good lot of Sega Card Gen cards on Mercari.

I'm not a set collector, but I'm familiar enough to know that the set collector's best friend is buying cards in bulk. And boy did this latest one fill in a lot of holes in two aspects of 2012 Sega Card Gen.

The Ichiro above is an "EX" card. I used to think it stood for exchange but now my understanding is that it's short for extra since these are extra short printed cards beyond the base set.

This latest lot came with five of these EX cards. This is absolutely huge to me because these EX cards were cards that were distributed in all kinds of weird ways, and these five specifically were distributed with cases. You see there was a brief promo during the 2012 Sega Card Gen season where instead of a normal card you'd get a redemption card and then you called over someone who was working at the arcade, give them the redemption card and then pick one case out of eight different cases. Each case came with one unique EX card.

During my time playing 2012 SCG I lucked into three of them and turned them into Ichiro Suzuki, Junichi Tazawa and Ike Davis. I gave one of these cases to The Lost Collector a few years ago.

Thanks to this lot I was able to get Yu Darvish, Hisashi Iwakuma, Norichika Aoki and Justin Morneau. Even got a second copy of Ichiro out of it! Cards of Ichiro from the day he got traded to the New York Yankees will always be cool.

Now all that's left for these EX cards distributed with cases is Munenori Kawasaki.

And for the other EX cards that were distributed in different ways (ie contest prizes) there's still Carl Crawford, Francisco Rodriguez, Grady Sizemore, Shin-Soo Choo, Joe Nathan, Magglio Ordonez and Roy Oswalt. Oy vey.

For whatever it's worth I've never seen the Sizemore/Choo/Nathan/Ordonez/Oswalt cards out in the wild except for screenshots on the Card Gen website.

So I need eight more shortprints. Now I know how Night Owl felt when he was building the 2008 Heritage set.

But enough moping about what I don't have, time to get back to being happy about what just came in.

Like more rare foils! The Curtis Granderson, David Wright and Jose Bautista foils were dupes but there is no such thing as bad Card Gen dupes. Especially not for superstar foils. Given where my head's been this past season I'm particularly thrilled about the Carlos Gonzalez foil.

Of those foils, Stephen Strasburg is the only one from 2013. 2013 Sega Card Gen is a set I will never collect because I never played it (I missed it entirely), but similar to 2009-2011 SCG I do still appreciate any I can get.

The lot also came with a few base cards, like eight Japanese MLBers from 2012 and one Iwakuma from 2013. The 2012 cards were all dupes.

And finally this lot featured 11 non-Japanese MLBers, one which was an Adrian Beltre from 2013. Everything from 2012 is a dupe. The Clayton Kershaw was always a favorite of mine because of the Brooklyn throwback unis but I've come to also appreciate the Miguel Cabrera since it gives the same aura when I see old photographs of Ty Cobb or other players from the early 1900's just sitting around and with a stern face like he's analyzing everything going around him. Also the Yadier Molina is great because it's a rare backstop catch at the net shot. Which sounds like a collection Dime Box Nick would have.

All in all this lot provided me a ton of fun with four new EX cards, four new foils and two new base cards from 2013 to my collection, along with some nice cards to just have around even if they are dupes.

2012 Sega Card Gen, the set that keeps on giving all these years later and all these kilometers away.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).