Saturday, July 4, 2015

Upcoming BBM Releases

BBM updated their website last week while I wasn't looking and published information on a number of upcoming sets:

- I previously wrote about this year's Baystars set and said that it would be out in late June.  BBM ended up delaying publication of the set for a month - it will now be out on July 17th.  There doesn't seem to be any more information about the set on the website than there was in SCM last month.

- The final two team sets for the year - the Lions and the Giants - will be released in the next few weeks.  Both of them have the "standard" 81 cards in their base sets that all the other team sets have had this year.  The Lions base set has 69 cards for the players (and manager), three "combo cards", six "puzzle cards", two "2014 Award Winner" cards and a checklist card.  There will be two nine card insert sets - "Raging Lions" and "Mighty Lions" - and the usual boatload of autograph cards - including ones with multiple players and "1 of 1" parallels.  The Lions set will be out July 11th.  The Giants base set has 70 cards for the players (and manager), a mascot/checklist card, three "Master Skill" cards and seven "Star-to-Be" cards.  There are six different insert sets - "Giants Pride" (9 cards), "Golden Hill" (3 cards), "Glorious Leader" (3 cards), "Great Bond" (3 cards) and "TRIPLEX" (3 cards).  There's a bewildering number of parallels for each of the inserts (as well as the player cards).  Some of them appear to be limited to the player's uniform number.  The "Giants Pride" cards have metallic parallels - either silver or gold.  The "TRIPLEX" cards are 3d and are limited to 25 cards apiece.  There are also memorabilia cards - undershirts and bats - that include multi-player cards.  The set will be out on July 15th.

- The latest team box set from BBM will be the Hawks "Autographed Edition" set (possibly a reaction to last season's "Signature Edition" sets from Front Runner?).  This set will contain 28 cards - a 27 card base set plus one autographed card.  Cards with autographs from multiple players are possible.  I'm not entirely sure, but I think there's some sort of "secret parallel" as well - I don't know if this means there's a parallel version of the autograph card or if there's a possible parallel to one of the base cards available as well.  This set hits the stores on July 24th.

- This year's 2nd Version set will be out on August 2nd.  Unlike the 1st Version set, this year's edition potentially has more cards in it than last year's.  This year's base set has 216 player cards (18 for each team) which has been the standard for the last six years.  There's also three subsets - a 36 card "1st Version Update" (3 per team), 12 team checklists and 36 more of the "Cross Plasma" cross set subset (3 per team) - plus the standard "1st Pitch Ceremony" subset although as usual BBM is not saying how many cards will be in this subset.  The total size for the base set is 300 cards and counting - last year's set was only 301 cards.  There's one 12 card insert set ("Future Legends") and a variety of autograph and memorabilia cards.  There is an amazing variety of parallel issues that will make your head swim - 72 of the player cards (six per team) have five different signed parallel versions with varying levels of scarcity, there's two different parallels for the "Cross Plasma" sets, and some sort of parallel for the "1st Pitch Ceremony" and "Future Legends" cards.

No comments: