While I was browsing for
bowling cards at my usual site for Japanese wax, I noticed that they were located in a section of the store for 'Other' sports. That made me wonder what other sports might have card products, so I clicked on over to see what they had. There were plenty of things, like tennis,
Shining Venus, rugby, and
sumo cards. But what caught my eye were these:
Yup, those are cards for the sport of curling. This is the 2016 BBM Curling Card Set: Chess on Ice. I think this is the first curling set from BBM, but I am not 100% sure on that. This photograph shows the top of the box. You get 41 cards in the box, a 39-card base set and 2 autographs.
The bottom of the box has a checklist and a couple more pictures of the base cards in the set. There are 20 base cards for the female curlers (in pink on the left), and 19 for male curlers (on the right in blue). I believe that the left-most column in each entry is the name of the curler, while the rightmost column is their team.
This is the underside of the box lid. The serial number for the set is in the upper right, with my set being # 0668 / 2000. The bulk of the design is what appears to be an excerpt from 'The Rules of Curling' that explains the spirit of the game. My translation app tells me that the English text at the bottom says the same thing as the Japanese text at the top.
Finally, we get to the cards nestled in the box, restrained by a band of paper. There is a plain white backing card to the rear of the stack, protecting the cards from the adhesive on the paper.
Here are four of the vertical base cards, two from each gender. Inside the colored band is the curler's name in both English and kanji. Below that is the team name followed by the curler's position (skip, second, third, or lead). In the lower corner is a small graphic depicting the House, which is the bullseye that determines scoring.
The card backs have a headshot as well as a virtual wall of text. The colored boxes features the usual information, like name, team, position, birth date, birthplace, height, weight, and blood type. The smaller box below the photo seems to be a list of achievements, and the larger box appears to be some kind of survey answers where the curler gets to talk about their life, hobbies, and things of that nature.
The horizontal cards contain all of the same information. They are just formatted a little differently. The curler's name runs along the left side of the card, and the team name and position are located at the bottom.
The backs of the horizontal cards are also horizontal, and contain the same design elements as the vertical cards, just positioned differently. I am still not sure why the female portion of the set has 20 cards and the males get have 19 cards. I was under the impression that a curling team has four individuals on it, but most of these groups have five listed in the checklist. Maybe they all run with alternates or substitute players? One of the male teams only has four names listed, and that leads to the imbalance in the checklists. I don't know if they left someone out or if that team just has four people on it.
According to
the official checklist, each curler has a total of four different autographs in the checklist. The horizontal format cards are the more common autographs, with the black ink versions having 49-50 cards each and the special ink variations (blue for men, red for women) having 25-26 copies for women and 20-21 copies for men.
I pulled a regular ink version of Chinami Yoshida 吉田知那美, who has appeared in several major events, including medals at the 2016 World Championship and 2013, 2015, and 2016 Pacific-Asia Curling Championships. She also appeared in the 2014 Winter Olympics, although Team Japan placed 5th and did not medal. Looking at her Wikipedia page tells me that most teams do carry an alternate, so that explains why most teams in the checklist have five names attached to them.
My son saw me editing the photo for this card, and he asked me, "Why do you have that card? Is that a janitor?" I tried to explain to him what curling was and I showed him a video of curling on YouTube. He saw them sweeping in front of the rock and asked, "Why are there two janitors?" I guess he'll have to figure out curling on his own some day.
The vertical autographs are more scarce than the horizontal cards. The black-ink base versions are limited to 20 copies across the board, while the colored-ink variations only have 10 copies apiece.
My vertical autograph is a black-ink base version of Satsuki Fujisawa 藤澤 五月. She and Chinami Yoshida are currently on the same team, and they are actually cards 1 and 2 in the base set. Both of the autographs I pulled in this set have nice curling doodles added, as well as the curler's name in English and kanji. Very nice, and much better than you get from most ballplayers.
This was a pretty fun set to add to my collection. It looks like my source for these has sold out of them, so I may not be able to pick up any more of them unless there is a restock. It looks like the price has increased slightly since my pre-order went through, from about $19 + shipping (postage from Japan for this order was $40 split between 5 items) to about $24 + shipping now.
