2013 BBM Tokyo Big Six

I got this year's edition of the BBM Tokyo Big Six set a few weeks back.  As has become the standard the last few years, this box set contains 37 cards - 36 base cards plus one special card.  The 36 base cards break down to six cards per team - five player and one team card.  The special card is either a "Tokyo Big Six Heroes" insert card or an autographed version of one of the player cards.

As usual, the cards look pretty good - an attractive design and very good photography.  I don't know enough about the players in the Tokyo Big Six league to know if the player selection is decent, although I did notice that Yuhei Takanashi, the Waseda pitcher who threw a perfect game back in April, was not included in the set (even though he was in last year's).

Here's some sample cards (all of them can be seen here):

#05

#11

#28

#19

#36

I was looking at the numbers and I'm kind of surprised by something.  If I'm reading BBM's website correctly, 28 of the player cards have 60 numbered autographed versions each and the other two have 59 each27 of the player cards have 60 numbered autographed versions each, two have 59 each and one has 58.  That's 17981796 total autograph cards.  The set has a print run of 2500, so there's an almost 72% chance that you'll end up with an autograph card.  But I didn't - I got an insert card of Akihiro Hakumura of Keio:

#SP03

That means that there's 704 sets that don't have autographed cards.  Since there's six insert cards (one for each team) that means that there's 117 or 118 of each insert card.

You can see several of the inserts at Jambalaya.

I ordered the set from Discount Niki via Rakuten Global Market.  The set itself was 1800 yen, but shipping was 1200 yen for a total of 3000 yen (around $31).  As was my experience the last time I ordered from Rakuten two years ago, I wasn't given any option other than EMS shipping and it wasn't clear until after I had placed the order exactly how much shipping was going to be.  On the other hand, I placed the order on a Sunday and I had the cards in my hand on Wednesday.  Given that the set' was going for 2500 yen at Jingu, I'm not too unhappy with the cost.  (On the other hand, Deanna says the base set was selling for 1000 yen at Mint Ikebukuro - I don't think the Hakumura insert is really worth 2000 yen but a trip back to Ikebukuro would probably run me more than that at this point...)