More New Stuff

I wanted to quickly mention a couple of sets that got announced in the last week or so...

- For the third year in a row the Hiroshima Toyo Carp have won the Central League pennant (remember that the pennant winner is the team that finishes first, not necessarily the team that wins the Climax Series and represents the league in the Nippon Series) and for the third year in a row BBM is issuing a box set to commemorate it.  The set is named "Triple Champion" and each box contains 37 cards - a 36 card base set plus one "special" card that will either be one of 12 3D cards or an autograph card.  My suspicion is that the autograph cards are extremely rare since the MSRP on the set is only 4000 yen.  The set has been getting smaller each year - the 2016 set ("Realization Of A Great Ambition" or something like that) had a base set of 54 cards and last year's base set ("Successful Achievement") had 45 cards (which means next year's set would be 27 cards, right?).  The base set is split between 30 player (and manager) cards and what I suspect are six "highlight" cards.  The set will be out in mid-October.

- Also for the third year in a row BBM is issuing the "Fusion" set.  This is a pack based set that I suspect will have a base set of 144 cards (since the previous two editions did) but I don't know that for sure.  The set appears to have the traditional four-way split with 24 Leader cards featuring the statistical leaders from the 2018 season, 96 player cards (both active and OB) and an unspecified number of "1st Version Update" and "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards.  The previous editions of the set had 102 player cards along with nine "1st Version Update" and nine "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards so I would expect that there will be six extra cards in the two subsets.  There will be three insert sets.  Two of these are what I guess you would call the standard Fusion insert sets - a 24 card "Great Record" set which shows two active players from each team celebrating a milestone and a 12 card "Legendary Player" set which features an OB player from each team.  The new one this year is another installment of the ubiquitous "Phantom" set - this time I think all 12 cards in the set are of OB players (as opposed to the active players featured in the "Phantom" inserts for the team sets).  There will also be various autograph cards available.  The set will be released in late November.

- SCC has apparently released another 2018 set.  Dan is referring to it as KBO Collection 2 Black.  The set has 115 cards - a 105 card base set plus 10 rare (#'d to 200) "Hidden Hologram" insert cards.  Dan has a friend who opened 20 boxes of the set and didn't get even one of the inserts.  One odd thing about the set is that it only features players from half the teams - Doosan, Kia, SK, NC and Hanwha.  Dan speculates that there might be yet another set with the players for the other five teams.