2015 Calbee Series One

The first of three expected sets from Calbee this year was released a couple weeks back.  The base set contains 103 cards, split up between 84 "regular" player cards, 12 "Exciting Scene" cards, 3 "Legend" cards and four checklist cards.

The design of the front of the "regular" player cards for Calbee has been essentially unchanged since around 1997 it's actually big news this year that there's a bit of change this year.  Instead of the players name being in white text, this year it's in black text with a white outline.  Other than that, this year's cards pretty much look like every other Calbee set, including the great photography:

#065

#014

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The 84 "regular" player cards are split up evenly between the 12 NPB teams with each team having seven cards.  Many of the photos are from last year but Calbee did manage to include several players who changed teams over the winter, either returning from MLB (Daisuke Matsuzaka, Kensuke Tanaka and Hiroyuki Nakajima) or changing NPB teams (Eiichi Koyano, Keiji Ohbiki and Yoshihisa Naruse) as well as a couple rookies (Tomohiro Anraku and Kohei Arihara).  Another notable player included is Alfredo Despaigne - this is his first Japanese card other than an SCM insert card last year.  (And there are players included in the set other than Yamazaki and Higa.)

The "Exciting Scene" subset (or non-premium insert set) commemorates 12 "exciting" events from last year, one for each team.  As usual I'm not entirely sure what the events are but the players in the subset include Shohei Ohtani, Masahiro Yamamoto, Shintaro Fujinami, Tetsuto Yamada, Rainel Rosario and Daisuke Miura:

#ES-11

The three card "Legend" subset is for three players who retired at the end of the 2014 season - Atsunori Inaba, Makoto Kaneko and Tomoya Satozaki.  Calbee had a similar subset in Series One last year.

#L-3

The four checklist cards feature team celebrations from either late last season or the post season - the Hawks winning the Nippon Series, the Giants clinching the Central League title in September, the Buffaloes winning Game 2 of Stage One of the Pacific League Climax Series (kind of odd since they didn't win the First Stage, the Fighters did) and the Tigers beating the Giants in the Final Stage of the Central League Climax Series:

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All the cards can be seen at Jambalaya (including the Star inserts and some of the mail-in premium sets and cards).