2007 BBM Weekly Baseball Opening Game Promos

I've been saying for a while now that one of the great unknowns of Japanese baseball cards are the cards that were issued with magazines.  While I think I've got a good handle on the ones issued with Sports Card Magazine, I'm constantly finding other cards that I'd never seen before.

Recently I discovered that there were 12 BBM 1st Version promo cards that were issued with Weekly (Shukan) Baseball magazine in conjunction with Opening Day in 2007.  Each card features one player from each team with a different photo than in the regular set.  Essentially they are each photo variants.  The fronts of the Weekly Baseball cards use a different color in their format and have the words "2007 Opening Game Weekly Baseball" on them but otherwise the design is exactly the same.  The backs are almost identical and have the same card number as the original card.  Here's all 12 cards along with the original 1st Version card (original on the left, Weekly Baseball version on the right):

#25

#51

#96

#126

#167

#187

#219

#281

#315

#332

#364

#418

I said that the backs were "almost identical" - at first glance they look exactly the same but a closer look reveals that the text on the bottom is subtly different.  Here's Norichika Aoki's cards as an example - again the original is on the left and the Weekly Baseball on is on the right:

The Weekly Baseball card has the text "昨年" which means "last season" prepended to the text on the bottom of the card - there's another character there as well but I'm not sure what it is.  Looking at all 12 cards - nine of them have those two characters prepended to the text while three do not - Hichori Morimoto, Hirotoshi Kitagawa and Shuichi Murata.

I don't know if BBM did this sort of thing any other year but I'll have to continue to keep my eyes open for it.  UPDATE - looks like they did 24 cards for 2006.  The first twelve were each team's first round draft pick.