2017 Flagship Set Announcements

Information on the first of the 2017 "flagship" sets from BBM and Calbee were released in the last week or so.

- Calbee's Series One will be released in late March (the official release date is March 27 but I would expect to see it available a few days earlier).  The base set has 72 player cards (six per team), 23 "Title Holder" cards and four checklist cards so it'll have 99 cards total.  There's also two insert sets - a six card "Legend" set featuring players who retired at the end of last season and the ubiquitous 24 card (2 per team) "Star" set.  There's also a 12 card boxed set called "Clutch Hitters" that is available through some sort of redemption I think.  The set's checklist is available on-line.

- BBM's 1st Version set will be out in early April.  The main details of the set are pretty much the same as they've been the past couple years - there's 372 cards in the base set - 324 cards for the players and managers (27 per team), the 12 team checklist cards (no word on the theme yet but I'd be happily surprised if it wasn't mascots) and a 36 card "cross set subset" - this year's version is called "CROSS SQUALL" and features a rainbow.  One twist this year is that BBM says that each team will have one card that has a photo variant - I don't know how rare these will be or any other details.  There are three insert sets - a 12 card "HyperNOVA" set featuring a rookie or second year player for each team, a 12 card "Rookie Reprint" featuring the reprint of a BBM rookie card for a player on each team and a 12 card "3D CROSS SQUALL" set.  There's also the usual overwhelming collection of parallels and the usual cornucopia of autograph and memorabilia cards.  The base card design looks VERY much like last year's Stadium Club cards from Topps.

- One other set was announced recently.  I had previously mentioned that an outfit called Hits was doing some sort of team based sets of "Trading mini colored paper" for the Hawks and Baystars.  They have just announced a similar set for the Swallows and features eight players, just like the other two did.  I'll repeat what Ryan said about the other two sets since I believe this set follows the same pattern:  "It...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."  The set will be out on April 22.