Near Sets vs Starter Sets

[seanofjapan]

I have a couple of monstrous Japanese sets I've been putting together for several years now, both of which I started on after buying small "starter sets". Both of them were issued by Calbee, a potato chip maker which distributes its cards 1 at a time in bags of potato chips, making the sets extremely hard to put together.

The first is the 1987 Calbee, which is 387 cards. I started off with a 60 card lot, about 15% of the set. After years of tracking them down I am just 31 shy of finishing the set (92% there). Its been a labor of love.

The more ambitious project is the 1975-76 Calbee set, which has almost 1400 cards including a lot of short printed ones, which probably makes it the biggest regular baseball card set ever issued (?). I started that one with a 50 card lot and after years of tracking them down now have a little over 500, which still puts me less than half way there. Even with me actively seeking them out this could literally take me the rest of my life to complete.

I think if I had bought a "near set" of either of these (if they were available, I think there are probably only a handful of people who have complete sets of these out there and they never sell them) I would have just put it on the shelf and said "close enough!" Getting them in much smaller numbers created a challenge for me that gave me some incentive to actually try and put them together.

[SAllen2556]

From childhood, I had about 300 of the ’73 set with no high numbers. I figured by the time I finished it it would be cheaper just to buy the whole set. So I did - it’s not that pricey of a set anyway. Now that I have it, I realize I have no emotional connection to it. I never look at it. It just sits. It’s nice to own, but I might as well have bought a savings bond. Blah. Never again.

The only way I would buy a complete set is if it was maybe 50% near mint (or whatever condition I was aiming for) and then try to upgrade the other half. In fact, I wonder if that’s the way to go - seems like the best bang for the buck. The only problem is you need a big chunk of change to start with.