BBM's website is apparently a mess. They had been doing updates of their new set listings about once a month. In March they did their regular update which disappeared a few days later. Now the site is apparently down completely. Since I don't know when it will be back up, I figure it would be best to go ahead with what I know about what's coming up in the next few months:
- BBM will be releasing the next three of their pack-based team sets in mid to late May. The sets for the Baystars, Carp and Lions will contain 81 cards in their base sets (broken into around 70 cards for the manager and players plus several subsets). The Baystars and Lions sets have a couple different insert sets containing 18 additional cards while the Carp set has 36 insert cards spread over five sets. Packs for all three sets have randomly inserted autograph cards while the Carp packs could also have memorabilia cards.
- BBM is releasing a box set for Tatsunori Hara called something like "Wakadaisho Of My Heart" this upcoming week. This will be a 36 card box set celebrating the career of the recently retired Giants manager. As you should expect from BBM, the box set contains the 35 card base set plus one "special" card that apparently could be from a wide variety of options - autograph cards, die cut autograph cards, "Super Metallic Silver" cards, "Super Metallic Gold" cards and I'm not completely sure what else.
- In late June BBM will be publishing a box set called "Go Higher" featuring Shohei Ohtani and Shitaro Fujinami. There will be 20 cards in the set - 18 cards for the base set plus one insert card and one "special" card. It looks like the insert card is one of four possible "RIVALS" card based on the insert cards of the same name from the 1997 BBM set. Once again there's a wide variety of possible "special" cards - memorabilia, autograph and metallic cards are possible.
There are some other additional releases to take note of:
- Epoch is releasing their second "Stars & Rookies" set this week - this time for the Baystars. Like the earlier Lions set, this set's a bit of a high end set. Each box (with an MSRP of 12,960 yen!) contains two mini-boxes that contain 5 base set cards and 1 autograph card. There are 30 cards in the base set and around 69 different possible autograph cards.
- I've been remiss in mentioning a couple new Korean sets that are actually already out. The first set is the 2016 version of the "Baseball's Best Players" set. This set is very similar to last year's set - including the design of the cards, the number of cards (10 cards for each of the 10 KBO teams or 100 cards in the base set) and the parallel cards (kira parallels for card #03 for each team, gold kira parallels for card #02 for each team and either gold signature or "clear" parallels for card #01 for each team). Probably the only real difference is that the "clear' parallels aren't actually clear plastic cards this time around. Not only has this set already been released but I already have a box of it - I'll try to get a post up on it in the next few days.
- The same company that released the "Baseball's Best Players" set (SMG Holding?) has also released box sets for two teams - Samsung and Doosan. Taking a cue from how BBM has been doing box sets, these box sets contain the complete 44 card base set for each team plus some sort of "special" card. There are 10 possible "Super Stick" cards that are a clear plastic card along with 5 possible memorabilia cards and 6 possible autograph cards. It is unknown at the moment whether there will be team sets made for the other eight KBO teams.
I want to mention here that Dan Skrezyna has started a blog about Korean Baseball cards and pretty much everything I wrote about the team sets is based on what he's found out about them. Dan doesn't have a lot of posts at his blog yet but he's got a number of pages up with useful information about the recent KBO sets along with videos of box breaks.
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