There was a couple weeks where I was starting to wonder what was going on - there didn't seem to have been any announcements being made about any 2017 releases. Then about a week or so, BBM made an announcement about their annual Retirement set and it's like the flood gates opened, with news of five new NPB sets and a new KBO set.
- BBM will be releasing the aforementioned Retirement set on January 28th. This is the seventh edition of this set and like the others it is a box set. Each box contains 37 cards - a 36 card base set plus one autographed card. The set includes cards of all the players who announced their retirement at the end of the 2016 season such as Hiroki Kuroda, Daisuke Miura, Takahiro Suzuki, and Saburo.
- BBM is releasing their annual Rookie Edition set in mid-February. This is a pack based set featuring all the players taken in last fall's draft. The base set has 126 cards - 114 for the draftees and 12 for a subset called "Early Days" that I think is for OB players. There are two insert sets - Next Generation (12 cards) which I think is a young player for each team and Rookie Of The Year (2 cards) which features the two Rookies Of The Year from the 2016 season (Hiroshi Takanashi and Shun Takayama). There are also autographed cards available for I think both the draftees and the OB players featured in the "Early Days" subset.
- Epoch is releasing another of their ultra high end sets in conjunction with the Japan Baseball Promotion Association (or OB Club). The set is called "Opening Day Starting Lineup" and each 16,200 yen (~$160) box contains a single pack of six cards - three base set cards, one "Holo Spectra" card and two autographed cards. There are 40 cards in the base set. Possible autographed cards include autographed baseballs, autographed bats (only Koji Yamamoto) and some sort of autographed booklet. The set will be out on March 18.
- There is a new outfit called Hits that is publishing a couple team based sets of "Trading mini colored paper", one for the Baystars and one for the Hawks. Both sets feature 8 players and each player has two "cards" - a "normal" card and a "gold foil signature" card. I think there are possible autographed cards with the sets as well but I'm not sure. Both sets will be released on April 8th.
- The latest KBO set is called "Black Edition" and looks very similar to the Blue and Gold Edition sets released in the past two years. The set has a bunch of autographed and memorabilia cards as well as some short printed cards and I think around 163 cards in its base set. I believe that this set is already out but it's possible that it won't be until this coming week. UPDATE - Just noticed that George did a post previewing the set and provided a link to the official website for it.
5 comments:
It's about time.
The Kuroda retirement set just came out, though I haven't been out to find any cards yet, and Hot Box posted about RE before BBM did.
Hits is actually not new, because they've been producing idol trading cards for years. I think they're part of the same group as Produce (which does the Swallows sets), Bomb, and some other brands. Based on that link, there are autographs - it looks like for the BayStars a total of 240 hand-signed cards are set for inclusion. It also seems that the full regular 8-card set will be in each box, along with two gold foil signatures, or one gold foil and one real signature. I'm not impressed. And continuing on that, a similar product came out this year for the BayStars (I'm pretty sure). I've seen packs in at least one card shop but I haven't really explored it yet. There were card-sized promo boards, along with the "mini paper" boards which are larger than regular cards. Eventually I'll get some so I can give more details.
Are you going to get a KBO box again?
I'm seeing posts of box breaks of the new Black Edition on Korean pages. Boxes are ~W50,000 and are numbered to 4000. Previous Gold boxes were numbered 5,000 and were ~W43,000.
The Kuroda set was announced back in November and for two months was the only set scheduled to be released in 2017. Hot Box and Niki typically have release information for BBM's sets before BBM puts it up on their website. I usually wait for BBM's announcement before mentioning the set though.
Thanks for the info on the Hits sets. You know me - if it's not a baseball set then it's invisible to me...
I haven't gotten boxes of the Blue or Gold Edition KBO sets simply because they're a bit more expensive than what I want to spend for KBO cards. And Dan's comment confirms that the Black Edition is even more expensive. So I won't buy a box but I'll probably end up with a base set somehow through Dan or one of the other KBO collectors I know (which is what I did for the Blue and Gold Editions - I should do a post on them sometime).
Would love to see posts on the KBO sets. Thanks for the primer on the new cards.
I've done posts on most of the previous KBO sets. Dan's blog (Korean Cardboard) and KBO Collections do a much better job of covering the KBO issues than I do.
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