Tuesday, September 12, 2017

New BBM And Epoch Sets Announced

BBM and Epoch have announced a handful of new sets in the past few weeks:

- The last few years BBM has issued a box set for one of the team's cheerleader/dance team.  It was the Hawks in 2014, the Dragons in 2015 and the Giants last year.  This year the set is for the Fighters' squad - Fighters Girl.  The set actually also highlights the team's mascots so it's official title is something like "Fighters Girl & B * B Family". Each box contains 60 cards - a 58 card base set plus two "special" cards which could be either autographed "cheki" cards.  Each box also contains a "raw photograph".  The base set contains 24 cards of the cheerleaders in their costumes, 24 cards of the cheerleaders in their street clothes, 1 card with a group photo and nine cards of the team's mascots.  The set will be out in mid September.

- Keeping with a Fighters theme, BBM's latest "Authentic Edition" box set is called "Young Fighters" and features Fighter players who were born after April 1990.  The box contains 30 cards - a 29 card base set plus one "special" card which could be either a jersey card or an autograph card.  I think that like the Carp and Tigers sets that were previously announced, the autograph card could be from a player who isn't in the base set - so you could pull an autograph of say Sho Nakata even though he was born prior to 1990.  There are nine players who have jersey cards available including (of course) Shohei Ohtani.  The set will be out in late September.

- Epoch is continuing to get back into the high end card sets after issuing a bunch of reasonably priced sets earlier this year.  Their next release is called "Pacific League Premier Edition" and is sold in a box of (I think) 8 cards for 16,200 yen (although Discount Niki is selling each box for 14,900 yen).  I'm not sure how many of those 8 cards are base set cards and how many are the "special" cards.  The base set contains 54 cards (which may be the same 54 players as their other Pacific League set from earlier this year).  The possible "special" cards include hologram, silk embossed, autographed and jersey cards.  The jersey cards include possible "shadowbox" and combination jersey and letter patch cards.  The set will be released on September 30th.

- Epoch will be releasing the "Swallows Premier Edition" or "Luxury Version" on September 30th as well.  At 12,000 yen per box this is slightly less expensive than the PL set but I think you only get six cards per box.  The base set contains 33 cards (three more than Epoch's Swallows team set from earlier this summer) and there is a parallel version of each card available.  There are apparently three different types of autographed cards available for each player and a bat & jersey memorabilia card is available for Tetsuto Yamada.  There's at least one multi-player autographed card available as well.

- Epoch is releasing yet another high end team set on October 8, this one is for the Orix Buffaloes (who Epoch did not do a reasonably priced set for earlier this summer).  I'm not completely sure of the title of the set - it's either "Premier Edition" or "Luxury Version".  Either way it's 12,000 yen for a box of six cards although it's guaranteed that three of those six cards are autographed.  The base set has 25 cards and I believe all of them are "holospectra" cards.  There's a veritable cornucopia of possible autograph cards including "Record Breaker", "Rookie" and "Star" ones.


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