Calbee announced their first set for 2013 (along with its checklist) on their website this past week. I'm not sure about something with the set - either the "Star" cards are no longer considered an insert set or Calbee has cut back on the number of cards in the set.
The set features 72 "regular" player cards, six per team. There's also two definite subsets - the 24 card "Title Holder" subset featuring players who either led their league in one or more statistical categories or won one or more awards (or led in a stat AND won an award) and the four card checklist subset (featuring team mascots apparently). There's also the 24 card "Star" set which in previous years has been considered an insert set, not a subset of the base set. The banner on the website for the "Star" set is blue, however, when in previous years it was red, indicating that it was an insert set. If it is still not considered part of the base set then Calbee has shrunk the size of their base set by at least one subset over what's been typical the last few years.
4 comments:
Looking at the checklist, I get the feeling that the checklist (4 cards), Star Card (24 cards), and Title Holder (24 cards) sets are all inserts (numbered differently), plus the 72 card base set. Then again, I'm not exactly sure what the difference is between a subset and an insert card (insertion ratio? Special printing?).
There's a Best Nine box set being advertised as a separate, online-only purchase. This probably replaces one of the inserts/subsets, and might be offered this way because four of the Best Nine players aren't appearing in the set. Perhaps Calbee pulled the set from pack insertion to pull the cards they couldn't include (just speculation) and as a result offered this set.
It'll be interesting to see what the cards look like given the change in banner color.
I notice that they never bother to "introduce" the new year's set designs. I guess when it hasn't changed in a decade or so, doesn't really matter. I'll get these translated and added to SCF sometime today.
@Ryan - there's always been a fine line between the subsets and the insert sets with Calbee. If you look at some of the on-line card shops like Jambalaya, you'll see that (at least for the last few years) they'll list the "Star" cards separately from the remainder of the set.
As for the four players in the Best 9 set but not the regular set, I would expect that they would show up in the Series Two cards later in the season.
Just realized three months later that I didn't understand what Ryan said - he meant that there's four guys who won Best Nine awards last year who are not appearing in the Calbee Best Nine set. They are Tony Blanco, Kensuke Tanaka, Hiroyuki Nakajima, and Yoshio Itoi. I'm guessing it's because all four have changed teams since the end of last year - Blanco and Itoi went to new NPB teams and Tanaka and Nakajima went to the US. All four appear in BBM's Best Nine subset in the 1st Version set however.
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