Latest New Releases

A couple new card sets have been announced in the last week or so:

- Pretty much as expected, BBM is doing an 80th Anniversary set for the Giants.  This will be a pack based set with 99 cards in the base set, a 12 card insert set and assorted autograph cards.  The 99 cards in the base set will divided into four subsets - six cards for "History Of Giants", 69 cards of OB Giants, 15 cards for the current team and nine cards for Giants team records.  The insert set is called "Giants Heroes".  I'll be curious to see if the two most noticeably absent players from the 70th Anniversary set (Masaichi Kaneda and Wally Yonamine) are included this time.  I think the set will be out in late October.

- Front Runner has announced two more team based box sets.  They are continuing their "Signature Edition" box sets that they had previously done for the Buffaloes and Lions with one for the Baystars.  Like the previous sets, the new set will include 22 cards - 20 cards for the base set and (I think) two autographed cards.  One of the more interesting things about the autographs is that I think Yulieski Gourriel is one of the players who signed for the set.  I'm not sure if any of the Cuban players have been available on an autographed card before.  The other set is for the Carp and has some sort of promotional thing going on with Mizuno.  I think the set is called something like "Hiroshima Toyo Carp X Mizuno".  It's the smallest set that Front Runner has done so far - 17 cards with 15 of those cards making up the base set and the other two cards being potentially autographed and jersey cards.  I'm not positive but I think that each box has one autograph card and one jersey card in it.  It looks like the press run for the set is limited to 1000 - I'm not sure what the runs have been on Front Runner's previous sets but I suspect that they were more like 5000.  Both of these sets will be released in October.

CORRECTION - looking at some of Ryan's posts about Front Runner/Frontier's box sets,  it looks like their standard print runs are in the 1000-1500 range, so the Carp sets print run will be in line with what they've done before.