Wednesday, September 23, 2020

More Fall Releases

A quick round up of some upcoming sets that were recently announced:

- Calbee's Series Three set will be released in mid October (officially it will be in stores on October 19th but it's usually available a few days before then).  The base set will have 89 cards - one more then usual - which will be broken up into 72 "regular" player cards (six per team), 12 "First Win" subset cards and five checklist cards.  The five checklist cards is one more than usual and makes up for the fact that Series Two had only three checklist cards.  There are 24 Star insert cards available and there will be a limited edition box set for the Opening Day cleanup hitters available on Calbee's Amazon store (not sure how much or if they'll ship outside of Japan - I kind of doubt they will).   The checklist for the set is available online here.

- Epoch has announced two more of their "Stars & Legends" combination active/OB player team sets.  The latest teams to be featured are the Hawks and the Dragons.  These are both examples of Epoch's ultra-high end sets as boxes for them retail for 16,500 yen (around $155) and contain four cards - although two of them will be autograph or memorabilia cards.  The base set for the Hawks contains 36 cards which is evenly split between active players and OB players while the Dragons base set will have 52 base cards (25 active players and 27 OB players - although the full roster of OB players has not been set yet).  Each set has a 3 card "DECOMORI SIGNATURE" (a processed foil facsimile autograph) and a six card "Gem" insert set - I think each of these is serially numbered and has parallel versions.  Both sets have a variety of different autographed cards and the Hawks set also has jersey cards available.  The Hawks set (which commemorates the 15th Anniversary of Softbank buying the team prior to the 2005 season) will be out on October 31st while the Dragons set will be out two weeks later on November 14th.

- Epoch has also announced their annual "Pacific League Premier Edition" set.  All I've seen about this set so far is a tweet from the company so I don't know all the details but I believe this is yet another ultra-high end set.  Boxes will sell for 15,000 yen (~$142) and contain six cards - three base set cards, one insert card and two "special insert" cards (either autograph or memorabilia).  The base set will have 54 cards - nine per team.  The nine per team will be split between seven "star" players and the first and second picks from last falls' draft.  There are two insert sets - Pacific League Superstars (24 cards) and Gem (18 cards) - and the usual wide variety of autograph and memorabilia cards.  The set will be out on November 7th (right in between the two "Stars & Legends" sets).

- SCC released their third set for the KBO a couple weeks back and Dan Skrezyna has put information about the set up at the Trading Card Database.  The set is called "KBO Premium Collection" and as usual the details are somewhat confusing.  Dan's got 120 cards listed as the base set and each team is separately numbered.  Each team has 11 to 13 cards in the base set but the card numbers for each team go from 1 to 20.  That's because there are two subsets/insert sets called "holo" and "rare" that fill in many of those other numbers.  There are also autograph and jersey (and jersey autograph) cards available.

2 comments:

Sean said...

It feels like Calbee's Series 3 is being released a lot later than usual this year. I hadn't checked Calbee's website for the release date, but for the past couple of weeks I've been thinking "Why isn't Calbee Series 3 out yet?" every time I walk through a grocery store's snack aisle and see a big pile of Series 2 bags.

NPB Card Guy said...

Yeah, it's at least two weeks later than usual. I think the last couple years it's come out right around the end of September.

Kind of wondering if Calbee will do a Samurai Japan set later this year. They'd be able to include last year's Premier 12 team (or at least everyone except Shun Yamaguchi since he's in Toronto...I mean Buffalo this year).