I picked up this awesome card on eBay a little while ago. It comes from the 2012 SEGA Card-Gen set. This card is actually from one of the inserts/subsets of the product. From what I can gather from Zippy Zappy's postings about the arcade game these cards came from, there was a period of time when the game machine would sometimes spit out a redemption card instead of a card from the base set. The redemption card could then be traded in at the counter for an Extra or Exchange card. This Ichiro comes from that special Extra set. It's got a great photograph and I can't imagine there are a whole lot of these floating around, especially in the US.
I obtained the Munenori Kawasaki card from this set from a webstore early in 2015. I saw this Ichiro card on that website at the time, but at $50 the price was a little steep for me. A couple of weeks ago the card popped up on eBay with a Buy It Now of $15. That's still a bit more than I like to spend on a baseball card these days, but in this case I thought it was well worth the asking price. I snapped it up as soon as I saw it in my eBay feed, as I figured there would be Ichiro/Yankee collectors all over it before long. It had only been listed for a little while when I completed the purchase; probably on the site for less than an hour.
I happen to know that the eBay seller I bought it from is the same guy who runs the webstore where I originally saw the card. Sure enough, when I went to check his site again the card was marked as Sold Out. Incidentally, he is the same person who sold me the complete 2013 SEGA Card-Gen base set, which I have sporadically been posting about since May of 2014. I've sent him a fair bit of my money, but the cardboard he sends me in return is well worth it. I just love these cards. It's too bad that this idea never took off in the United States and it's unfortunate that 2013 was the last year these sets were made in Japan. The supply of SEGA Card-Gen cards has almost completely dried up on eBay and I imagine it will dwindle away almost entirely very soon.
Nice pickup, I managed to get this in Japan with the carrying case included back in late 2012 (or early 2013). I did a translation post for this very card early in my blog's existence too.
ReplyDeleteYou're assumptions about these exchange cards are semi-correct. These EX cards came in different forms. In the case of this Ichiro (and the Kawasaki you picked up earlier) instead of a normal card the machine dished out a redemption card which you could hand to an attendant who works at the arcade (note, Japanese arcades are run a lot differently/more efficiently than American arcades) and tell them which case (and card) you want. If they still have any in stock (the Ichiro and Darvishes were the first to go out of stock) then they'd bring back the case. If all redemptions were that convenient I'd have no beef with redemptions.
However there were a few special even more exclusive EX cards which were sort of like online sweepstakes cards. In 2012 they were Shin-Soo Choo, Grady Sizemore, Joe Nathan and one other guy (either Roy Oswalt or Magglio Ordonez).
Some EX cards were given away as participation prizes in official Card Gen contests. In 2012 these included Hanley Ramirez, Carl Crawford, Cole Hamels, Francisco Rodriguez, Aroldis Chapman, Buster Posey, Jason Giambi and Stephen Strasburg.
The last kind of EX cards were basically the grand prizes if you won the contests. They were foil versions of the non-Ichiro Japanese players like Hiroki Kuroda, Junichi Tazwa, Hideki Matsui, Daisuke Matsuzaka and a few other Japanese major leaguers who were in the 2012 set. Note, guys like Kawasaki, Aoki, Darvish and Iwakuma who had normal EX-cards in 2012 did not have these EX-rares in 2012. They did have EX-rares in 2013 though.