Sunday, November 10, 2019

Winding Down The Old Year And Kicking Off The New One

Here's some recently announced sets that are being released in the next two months:

- Epoch is releasing four new entries in their ultra high end combination active/OB player team sets called "Stars & Legends" for the Lions, the Tigers, the Fighters and the Swallows.  Each box retails for 16,500 yen (~ $151) and contains two packs containing two cards each - I believe each pack contains an autograph card so there are two in each box but I don't know that for sure.  The Lions set will be out on November 16th and will feature a 40 card base set containing 35 cards of active players and only 5 cards of retired players.  There are two types of serially numbered GEM insert cards and seven types of autographed card available.  The Tigers set will also be released on November 16th and has a base set of 42 cards including 28 active players and 14 OB ones.  There are serially numbered GEM inserts and two different types of autographed cards available in the boxes (although I think the autographed cards have parallel versions).  The Fighters set hits the streets on November 30th and has a base set of 69 cards with 35 active players and 34 OB players - which includes Shohei Ohtani.  This set also has two varieties of GEM insert cards (serially numbered of course) and four different flavors of autograph cards.  The Swallows set comes out on December 1st and has a base set of 33 cards - 31 active players and just two OB players (Hirotoshi Ishii and Aaron Guiel).  Like the Fighters set there are two types of GEM insert cards and four types of autograph cards.

- I want to mention that it does not appear that Epoch is doing a set for the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) this year.  They appear to be doing it on an every two year basis having previously done sets in 2016 and 2018 so hopefully it'll be back next year (although the league is having issues right now and may not still be around next year).

- There are two new KBO sets from Daewoo Media/SCC, one that's been out for a couple weeks and one that's been released next week.  The one that's been out for a couple weeks, KBO Collection 2, contains a base set of 200 cards split up among "normal" (89), "rare" (40), "holo" (30), "All Star" (21) and "signature" (20) (which are facsimile signatures, not real ones).  The All Star cards actual feature photos from the All Star game or associated festivities.  There are parallel versions of the All Star cards ("All Star Rare") and two different varieties of autograph cards - regular (89 different) and red (15 different).  Dan Skrezyna has added checklists with scans of all the cards for the set to TradingCardDB.com.  The other set is called KBO Premium Collection 2 and will be released on November 14th.  I think the base set for it will be 235 cards split between 120 "normal" cards, 45 "rare" cards, 40 "holo" cards and 30 "[facsimile] signature" cards.  There will also be 10 "hidden holo" cards, 28 jersey patch cards, 252 "base autograph" cards, 37 "silver autograph" cards, 40 "red autograph" cards and 11 "gold autograph" cards.  Thanks to Dan for all the information on these two sets.

- BBM has announced their fourth annual "Time Travel" set.  This one will feature the year 1985.  The base set will contain 99 cards and will be split into the five subsets that have come to be standard for at least the previous couple Time Travel sets - 72 "regular" cards featuring players from 1985 (I would expect six per team), nine cards of players who retired in 1985, an unspecified number of cards for baseball highlights from 1985, another unspecified number of cards of players born in 1985 and yet another unspecified number of cards of pop culture highlights from 1985.  Those last three subsets should add up to 18 cards.  There will be 18 insert cards - 8 cards for Central League Title Holders and 10 cards for Pacific League ones - and a number of autographed cards available.  I believe that this will be the first set with a 2020 cover date although the sample images on the web page use 2019.  The set will be released in mid-December.

The Time Travel theme brings two songs to mind - this, of course:



as well as this:

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