2016 KBO "Baseball's Best Players" Set

As I mentioned the other day, I picked up a box of one of the latest Korean baseball card sets recently.  This is the second of the "Baseball's Best Players" sets and it's very similar to the previous one.

Each box contains 20 eight card packs.  Each of the eight card packs contains seven base cards and one parallel card.  There are no short print, autograph or memorabilia cards available with this set.

Unopened Box

Opened Box

Stacks of packs

Wrapper

I'm not sure I'm going to say anything about this set that Dan hasn't already said but let's give it a shot.  The base set has 100 cards split evenly among the 10 teams in the KBO.  The 10 cards for each team appear to be a lineup for the team (each team inludes only one pitcher) although I can't say that for sure.  Each team is numbered separately - the Doosan Bears cards are numbered PA02-DO001 to PA02-DO010, the Samsung Lions cards are numbered PA02-SA001 to PA02-SA010, etc).  The cards are designed to be used in a collectible card game - the fronts have "ATK" and "DEF" numbers that I assume mean "Attack" and "Defend" and the backs of the cards are all identical.

If all of this sounds familiar it's because the previous set had all these same features.  In fact, the design of the front of this year's cards is identical to the design of last year's cards.  And the backs are also exactly the same so if you were actually playing this game you could use cards from either set interchangeably.

Here's some example base set cards:

#PA02-DO004 (Jae-Won Oh)

#PA02-KI009 (Suk-Min Yun)

#PA02-LG010 (Kyang-Cheol Choi)

#PA02-LO002 (Jeon-Suk Choi)

#PA02-NC009 (Jae-Hak Lee)

#PA02-SK005 (Ju-Hwa Na)

Card Back

There are four types of parallels and they break down pretty much the way that the parallels in the first set do.  From most common to least common they are "kira" (which are only for card #003 for each team), "gold kira" (only for card #002 for each team), "gold signature kira" (which are only for card #001 for each team) and "clear card" (which are also only for card #001 for each team).  Here's an example for each:

#PA02-SA003 (Han-Yi Park)

#PA02-NE002 (Seok-Min Yun)

#PA02-HA001 (Geun-Yu Jung)

#PA02-KT001 (Kyoung-Soo Park)

The big difference between this set and the previous one is in the previous one, the "Clear Card" was actually a translucent plastic card while this one is "just' a regular card.  I think the reason for that is so that the card can be used in game play.  Take a look at the "ATK" and "DEF" values on the Park card above.  One the "regular" card of Park, those values are 50 and 40 respectively so the parallel version of this card is much more powerful than the regular card.  These are the only parallel cards that have boosted values.

As I said above, the box contains 20 packs of 8 cards - 7 base set cards and 1 parallel.  There are 100 cards in the base set and 40 possible parallels.  The box should contain 140 base set cards and 20 parallels.

Here's what I got:

139 base set cards (100 unique)

10 "kira" parallels (8 unique)

5 "gold kira" parallels (5 unique)

4 "gold signature" parallels (3 unique)

1 "clear card" parallel (1 unique)

Like last time, I'm short a base set card.  Somehow one of my packs must have been short a card but I didn't notice while I was opening the packs.  The good news is that I got a complete base set.

I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the players in the set but there is overlap between the players in this set and the players in the previous set.  Dan added a checklist for the set over at The Trading Card Database which is how I identified the players in the samples above.  As usual there are no foreign players in the set.