Chips And Cheerleaders

A couple newly announced sets to talk about:

- The checklist for this seasons's Series Two from Calbee went up on their website in the last week or so.  Like Series One, the new set has 72 player cards (six per team) and a 12 card subset featuring a player (or in the case of the Giants and Tigers manager) from each team's first victory of the year.  Along with the four ubiquitous checklist cards, this means the base set has only 88 cards.  There's an additional card for the Legend insert set/premium subset from Series One that featured players retired at the end of last season - the additional card is for Nobuhiko Matsunaka who didn't announce his retirement until the end of February.  There's also the usual 24 card (2 for each team) Star insert set/premium subset included as well.  The official release date of the set is June 27th but as I said for Series One, it would not be a surprise to see the cards available the weekend before.

- The first of BBM's annual cheerleader sets is due out in late June.  Dancing Heroine - Hana is a pack based set with at least 87 cards in the base set split between the cheerleader squads of 9 teams - the Hawks, the Fighters, the Marines, the Lions, the Eagles, the Swallows, the Giants, the Tigers and the Dragons.  Obviously they are not evenly divided among the teams - each team has between 8 and 12 cards.  And if I'm understanding what the translation of the website says, there's actually two other teams included - the Buffaloes and the Baystars - but BBM doesn't know how many cards there will be from those two teams.  Each base set card has a "holo" parallel version available.  There are also autograph and "cheki" random inserts as well.