New Stuff

There's several new sets coming out in the next month or so that I haven't had a chance to write about yet so let's get caught up:

- The final BBM pack based team set for the year will be out on Wednesday of this week (the 27th).  It's for the Chunichi Dragons and like all the team sets this year, it features 81 cards in its base set.  There'll be 70 cards for the manager and players along with subsets for "Season Highlights" (5 cards), "Key Players" (3 cards) and "Dependable Veterans" (3 cards).  There will also be 18 insert cards split between four different sets - "Fresh Stars" (3 cards), "Winning Formula" (3 cards), "Score Source" (3 cards) and "Enter The Dragon" (9 cards).  There will also be autographed cards available as inserts.

- BBM's second flagship set - 2nd Version - will be released in mid-August.  This year's set will pretty much be a carbon copy of last year's set, at least in number of cards.  There'll be 216 regular player cards (18 per team) along with three subsets - a 36 card "1st Version Update" (3 per team), 12 team checklists and 36 more of the "Cross Freeze" cross set subset (3 per team).  BBM is also including the usual "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards with the usual vagueness of how many there will be.  There's a 12 card insert set ("One and Only") and autograph and memorabilia cards - I think the memorabilia cards are jersey cards for Shun Takayama and Louis Okoye (including a card with both of them) but I'm not positive that there aren't others available as well.  It looks like for the first time there will be autographed versions of the "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards available as well.  There's also the usual plethora of parallel versions that are too numerous to mention right now.

- BBM will be releasing the latest of their "Autographed Edition" box sets in mid-August.  The first is for the Lions and is entitled "King Of Beast" while the other is for the Tigers and is called "Jet-Black Tiger".  Both box sets will come with 29 cards in the box - 27 base set cards and two special cards.  The Lions set will have an autographed card and a "luxury insert card of foil autographed using a hologram paper" called "SPARK" while the Tigers set will have two autographed cards - including ones that may have more than one signature on them.

- Sports Graphic Number is releasing a set in September called "15 Hiroki Kuroda x 25 Takahiro Arai".  This is a pack based set featuring (as you might guess) Carp players Hiroki Kuroda and Takahiro Arai.  There will be 72 cards in the base set (36 for each player) as well as a bunch of insert, photo, autograph and memorabilia cards.

- I hadn't noticed this until today but Jambalaya has a listing for a Baystars team issued set featuring at least 25 3D cards.  There's at least two premium cards as well.  That's pretty much all I know about the set - I'm not even sure when it was released.