Calbee Series Two Has Been Reins-tater-ed! (and other new stuff)

If you recall, a month ago I reported that Calbee's Series Two this year had been delayed by the fact that the potato crop in Hokkaido had failed this spring due to typhoons that hit the island last summer and that Calbee had had to halt production of much of its snack lines because they didn't have enough potatoes to make chips from.  I'm happy to report that Calbee's website is now reporting that the Series Two set will be released on or about September 4th.  The base set has 72 player cards (six per team), 12 "Draft Pick" cards featuring the 1st round draft pick for each team and four checklist cards for a total of 88 cards.  There's also the ubiquitous 24 card (2 per team) "Star" insert set.  The "Lucky Card" redemption set is a 12 card "Opening Pitcher" set that features the Opening Day starter for each of the 12 teams.  As always, Calbee has the checklist for the set available on-line.

With Series Two being delayed by roughly 2 1/2 months you may be asking yourself what this means for Series Three which typically is released in mid-September.  The answer is...I don't know.  I've sent a message off to Calbee this morning asking about Series Three but I've not gotten an answer yet.  It would be somewhat disappointing if there were no Series Three this season since that would also mean that there were no "regular" player cards for Shohei Ohtani, Tetsuto Yamada and Yuki Yanagita among others.

BBM has also recently announced a couple new team specific boxed sets - "Young Carp" and "Young Tigers".  Both of these box sets are from BBM's "Authentic Edition" series and contain 26 cards - 25 cards for the base set and one "special insert" card that's either a memorabilia card or an autograph.  The 25 players in the base set are all "young" players on the team - born after April 1990 in the case of the Carp and after April 1991 in case of the Tigers.  There are nine possible memorabilia cards for each set - I think they're all jersey cards in the case of the Tigers but there's a Seiya Suzuki bat card available with the Carp set.  The autograph cards include players who aren't in the base set (so they aren't necessarily young).  The sets will be out in late August and the MSRP on them is 6000 yen.  The sets are limited to 2000 apiece.