2013 BBM 1st Version

Thought I'd do my writeup of this year's 1st Version set in the same style I've been doing the "regular set" posts.

2013 BBM 1st Version Set Summary

Size:  445 cards (cards numbered 1-409, then 36 cards of "Cross Wind" subset are skip numbered)
Cards Per Team:  28 (team card, manager + 26 players)
Team Card Theme:  Mascots
Number Of Leader Cards: 36
Checklists: 0
Subsets: Best 9 (19), Golden Glove (18), Cross Wind (36)
Inserts: New Principal, Diamond Rookie, Lightning
Memorabilia Cards: Various Jersey cards, autographed "Cross Wind" cards
Parallels: silver signature (9 per team), gold and hologram signature (numbered), numbered parallels for rookie cards, Best 9, Golden Glove, Cross Wind, New Principal and Diamond Rookie cards.
Notable Rookies: Shohei Ohtani, Tomoyuki Sugano, Shintaro Fujinami

I was going to start writing about this set by complaining - the set has the same subsets as last year, there's too few cards in the set, the cross set subset thing is getting old, the mascots on the team checklist cards is REALLY getting old - but one thing keeps me from doing it:  the cards are freaking gorgeous.  BBM has returned to a full bleed photo on the regular player cards for the first time since 2009 and it looks really good.  BBM also has the usual fine photography (and this year Keiichi Hirano is not shown doing a head first slide) and the combination of great photos and a good design really shines.

#313

I'm being a bit premature on picking significant rookies from the set but so far those three are a good start.  Here's another:

#238

I've got the insert cards and parallel versions listed in the summary but I don't know much about them as I don't have any  Jambalaya has pages up for the silver signature parallels, the inserts (except for the Lightning cards) and the memorabilia and numbered parallel cards.  If I'm reading this right, the numbered parallel versions of the Best 9 and Golden Glove cards are plastic.

I'll mention that there's another parallel edition out there that I didn't list above.  The guy I bought my set from included a small set of six cards labelled "Card Shop Limited Edition".  The cards are all double sided so there are 12 players included in the set (one from each team of course).  Because they are double sided, they are unnumbered.  The cards differ from the regular version by having a gold tinted background (and the background of the bar with the player's name is also gold).

#20 on left, unnumbered parallel on right

As I said above, the cross set subset thing is getting old.  BBM completed the "elements" theme that started in 2010 with the Cross Stream (water) set, followed by the Cross Blast (earth) set in 2011 and the Cross Fire set in 2012 with the Cross Wind set.  Like last year's set, Cross Wind will have 36 cards in the 1st Version set, 36 cards in the 2nd Version set and the final 36 cards in Genesis (or whatever the high end set ends up being called this year) for a total of 108 cards (9 per team).  Like every other year, the front of each card features the image of a player superimposed on the same background on every card - this year the background represents wind with clouds.  The back of each card shows the original full picture that the player's image was taken from.  The cards are numbered separately from the rest of the set - the first three cards are CW001-CW003, the next three are CW010-CW012, the next three are CW019-CW021, etc.

#CW038

Back of #CW038

Also as I said above, the team mascot thing is getting really old too.  This makes the fourth time in the last five years that BBM has used mascots on the team cards - and I'm pretty sure they didn't do it last year simply because the Baystars hadn't revealed their new one yet.

#405

Here's some additional cards (bought a complete set so no wrappers or other ephemera):

#263

#074

#271

Back of #155

#327

#363

#395

All the cards can be seen here.