New Sets and WTF?

A round up of some new stuff I've seen lately:

- BBM put up information for a couple new sets recently:

There's a box set commemorating Tomonori Maeda's career coming out in early December.  The set contains just 19 cards - 18 cards for Maeda's career and a "special" card that could be some sort of memorabilia card.

The latest in the "Greatest Games" boxed sets is also coming out in early December.  This one is for the Tigers' victory over the Swallows on October 16, 1985 that clinched the Central League for Hanshin for the first time in 21 years.  They went on to win their lone Nippon Series championship that year.  The set will contain 37 cards - 36 base set cards plus one "special" card - I think there are only some form of autograph cards available but I'm not positive.

Just before the end of the year BBM will be releasing a "Dragons Legend" set.  This pack based set will feature only 72 cards - 14 cards for the "2014 Dragons Leaders" during their playing days and 58 cards for players from 1987-2001 (starting from the first year of Senichi Hoshino's first stint managing the team to the last year of his second stint).  I think was is meant by "2014 Dragons Leaders" is the manager and coaching staff but I don't know for sure.  Whether this would include Hiromitsu Ochiai, the new GM of the team as well remains to be seen as well.  The cards use a similar design to last year's Giants and Tigers Legend sets.

- I noticed a couple cards for sale on Ebay that are autograph cards for players from the Japanese Collegiate National Team.  It looks like they are some sort of insert in the new Panini Team USA box set.  I haven't been able to find out much about the set on-line so I don't know a lot about them.  I don't know if there are only autograph cards available or if there are other forms of memorabilia cards also.  The whole concept seems similar to Upper Deck putting memorabilia cards for the 2007 Japanese Collegiate National Team in the 2008 Team USA box sets.

- The new Shinya Miyamoto box set from BBM got released this past week and Jambalaya has all the cards on line.  I did a double take this morning when I was looking through them - the set contains 15 cards for Miyamoto's team mates on the 2013 Swallows team.  Now, if you were putting together a list of 15 players to represent the 2013 Tokyo Yakult Swallows, there's a number of difficult decisions that you would have to make.  I mean, after all, the team wasn't very good.  But I would think that one choice would be a no-brainer, you know, the guy who broke the 49 year old single season home run record.  But apparently BBM felt differently and Wladimir Balentien does not appear in the set.

- It's almost December and I've seen no indication that there will be a Nippon Series set out this year.  BBM has failed to mention them in the past so it's not entirely out of the question that the set might still be forthcoming but I get more and more pessimistic about the chances every day.