Tiny, Tuffy and Taiwanese Cards: Part I (and semi-evenly spread thanks)

      A couple of big thanks (of appropriately varying size) to NPB Card Guy of the Japanese Baseball Card Blog and Ryan G of This Card is Cool (among others) for all of the cards you are about to see here (some cards not for use with some sets).  Freshly back from his WBC-watching tour of Japan, the Guru of Eastern Cardboard flung this batch of goodies at me via the USPS.  I'll take them in the order implied in the title and start with The Tiny.



     Measuring in at a just 1.25" x 1.75", hailing from a plastic capsule machine near you, I present the  Epoch TCP (Trading Card Plate) series from 2011. プロ野球トレカプレート

     In addition to baseball cards, since at least 2004, Epoch has also been making a variety of sets of toys and other assorted oddities to put in those plastic capsule/bubble machines you usually see at the front of K-Mart or grocery stores in the USA.  You can browse their previous offerings on their Capsule Collection website.

    The TCP 2011 cards also came with this little, folded pamphlet that includes the checklist, information about what seems to be a special version of the set, as well as the directions for using the nifty little key chain hanger seen to the left.  To the right is the result.  A great many of the odd and ends available from Epoch's Capsule Collection seemed intended to hang from something, either as a necklace, bracelet, cellphone charm or key chain charm.

    The special cards have a sort of sparkly, refractive quality to them that should be familiar to collectors of Calbee cards from the last decade or so.  Here is an image of one from this Japanese toy store website.

     Here is the flyer as was probably seen on the front of the capsule machine when these cards were still in circulation.  I've added both versions of the checklist to the SCF Inventory Manager and TradingCardDB.com, and will soon add them to Zistle.com.

More to come...