New Upcoming Non-BBM Sets

BBM has not updated their website in over a month - there's something like eight sets from them in the pipeline right now (including this year's 1st Version) but I will continue to wait to post anything about them until they put it on their website (you can see the sets for yourself over at Discount Niki and/or Hot Box).  In the meantime, there's a couple other releases to talk about.

- Series One from Calbee hits the stores on or around March 21 (that's the official release date but don't be surprised to see them showing up online a few days before that).  The base set has 72 player cards (six per team but you already had guessed that) along with 18 "Title Holder" cards, 10 "Legend" cards (for retired players) and four checklist cards (looks like the theme for them is the 2015 post-season).  As usual there's a 24 card "Star" insert set (and I'm assuming that it has the gold facsimile parallels but there's nothing on the web page about them).  There do not appear to be any "lucky" cards or premium box set available with the set. 3/19 UPDATE - as I speculated, the cards are already available.  The 10 card "Legend" subset is actually a premium subset/insert set so the base set is 94 cards (72 player cards + 18 "Title Holder" cards + 4 checklist cards).

- I've been wondering for a while if Epoch somehow acquired Front Runner as the Dragons X Mizuno set that Epoch put out last fall strongly resembled some Front Runner sets from 2014 (and Front Runner hadn't issued any sets since spring last year).  Epoch has announced a Lions "Stars & Rookies" set that will be released in April which looks kind of similar to the "Heroes & Rookies" box sets that Front Runner did last spring.  The big difference is that the new set is not a box set - it looks kind of like a high end set.  Each box (which has an MSRP of 10,800 yen or around $95) contains two mini-boxes.  Each mini-box contains five "regular" cards and one autograph card.  The base set has 29 cards and there's a myriad of possible autograph cards.  It will be interesting to see if Epoch releases similar sets for other teams the way that Front Runner did the last couple years.