Had To, Obviously

 We're now weeks into the regular season folks, you know what that means. It means the Topps Now cards I ordered from the last two games of the WBC tournament finally arrived.

During the early rounds of the WBC I passed on getting the Team Japan cards, mainly because I knew Topps was going to pump out a lot in order to capitalize off of the Japanese collector/flipper market. Which they did. Topps even set up a Japanese branch a while ago for ToppsNow and other orders made specifically for Japan. My understanding is that this site would often have issues and a lot of orders made by Japanese consumers were cancelled and refunded. Oy vey.

But when it came time for the semifinals and the championship game, even I thought it was go time. The earlier games were fun but once the pool winners were decided the stakes just kept building and we got a ton of fantastic March baseball out of it. I got a joke off earlier at ToppsNow's expense but I do admit that it's perfect for moments like that where you just want to seize the moment, preserve it and come back to appreciate it later at your leisure.

I'm not sure entirely why but for some reason Topps sent me the championship game cards from 3/21/2023 first even though I also ordered cards from the semi-final the day before, which is why most of the cards from the last game are being shown first.

I bought the six-card daily lot for the 3/21/2023 cards and also the 12-card Champions quasi-team set, as of now that 12-card set hasn't been made or sent to me but fingers crossed it gets here soon since there's a big Nootbaar sized hole in my collection.

Also I didn't scan it but Trea "Captain America" Turner was also in this lot. I'll probably end up zapping someone with it later.

Now onto the semi-final cards which arrived two days after the championship cards. The championship game between Japan and the US was exciting but mostly because of the way it ended. Shohei Ohtani vs Mike Trout is exactly what everyone wanted to see from the start of the whole tournament. But IMHO the Japan vs Mexico game from the night before was the more entertaining game. Mostly because there was a lot more action evenly spread throughout the game which kept it engaging. Like how with one swing Masataka Yoshida tied things with a three run dinger. Very happy I got that WBC card first rather than him as a Red Sock.

The game ending with a walk-off, which is exciting in general, helps my point methinks. Once Japan learned that they were allowed to hit the ball to the parts of the field that Randy Arozarena wasn't present they finally took advantage of that. Also the video from the official WBC Twitter for this is just magical.

I didn't scan the Luis Urias two-run home run card from this game either but I got it. I have an idea on where to send that one later this year.

Also worth noting that the semi-final is where North America got formally introduced to the best of the best in Japan right now. Namely Roki Sasaki, Yamamoto Yoshinobu and Munetaka Murakami. Baseball weebs on Twitter have heard about these three for a while but this was everyone's first time seeing them go up against MLB level talent in the US. I'm truly jealous of everyone who got to see all three have their moments in this game in person in Miami.

One interesting thing is that Murakami's card is the only one with a picture on the back as well (the rest just have blurbs and brief write-ups). Nootbaar's weird stance makes me laugh but I don't blame him, I'd go nuts too after being a part of a wild game like that.

Here's something that's also very wild, a fun pull! I wasn't expecting it at all but I lucked into a parallel of Murakami. I had no idea it was even possible to get a parallel if you didn't order one of those lots of the same card. But apparently it is! I actually bought a 5-card lot of the walk-off card itself for a chance at a parallel of that, didn't work, but I'm more than happy with this parallel instead for sure.

The Murakami parallel showing up in that mailer made me a lot more giddy and excited than I want to admit. It's honestly kind of perfect how it just added more to the excitement of that moment for me. That walk-off itself got me hyped and excited, and just a few weeks later a card commemorating it did the same thing.

ToppsNow got me good with this one. All of these cards are fantastic and I'm glad I got them.

Saved the best for last.

What a moment.

What a card.

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

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.