Wednesday, November 23, 2016

2016 KBO Baseball's Best Players Set Vol. 3 - Forever Ace


I received my box of the latest KBO set last weekend.  This is the third edition of the "Baseball's Best Players" set overall and the second to be published this year.  Dan Skrezyna has made the suggestion that we start calling these sets by their fully translated names so the first set (from late 2015) should be called "Hell's Fireball" and the second set (from early 2016) is called "Diamond Winners".  This set is titled "Forever Ace".

Like the two previous sets, this set has 100 cards in its base set - 10 per team.  The cards for each team are numbered separately - the Doosan Bears cards are numbered DO001 to DO010 while the Samsung Lions cards are numbered SA001 to SA010 and so on.  There are parallel versions of 30 of the cards.  All 10 cards that are number 003 have a "kira" parallel, all 10 cards that are number 002 have a "gold kira" parallel while all 10 cards that are number 001 have a "gold signature" parallel and a "clear" parallel.  This makes a total of 40 parallel cards.  And to be "clear" (so to speak), the "clear" parallels in this set are not actually the transparent plastic cards that they were in "Hells Fireball".

As in the two previous sets, the cards are intended for use in some collectible card game.  The backs of the cards are all identical to those of the previous two sets.

The box I bought had 20 packs in it.  Each pack had 8 cards - 7 base set cards and 1 parallel card.  As has been the case with the previous boxes, my box was actually short a little - I should have had 140 base cards but instead I only had 139.  I was keeping track when I opened the packs and I noticed that the pack that was short a card was also the pack that had the "clear" parallel card in it.  That might not be a coincidence since the "clear' parallel is the rarest of the parallels.

I was a little disappointed that I did not get the entire base set in the box.  I ended up short one card.  Here's the breakdown of what I got in the box:

Here's what I got:

139 base set cards (99 unique)
10 "kira" parallels (8 unique)
5 "gold kira" parallels (4 unique)
4 "gold signature" parallels (2 unique)
1 "clear card" parallel (1 unique)

Here's some examples cards:

#PA03-HA006 Seong-Hyuk Shin

#PA03-NC008 Seong-Wook Kim

#PA03-LG010 Jae-Wook Park

#PA03-LO003 Jun-Woo Jeon (Kira parallel)

#PA03-LO002 Ah-Seop Son (Gold Kira parallel)

#PA03-SK001 Gwang-Hyun Kim (Gold Signature parallel)

#PA-03-DO001 Geun-Woo Park (Clear parallel)
Dan has also done a post on this set and has also uploaded the checklist and complete base set images to the Trading Card Database.  There's also a new KBO card blog called KBO Collections that just started up in the last couple weeks run by another American in Korea named George and he recently did a post on this set (as well as the previous two) as well.

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