2017 BBM Genesis set

For the first time ever, I picked up this year's edition of BBM's high end set Genesis.  I bought a base set which was relatively cheap (1500 yen on Yahoo! Japan Auctions before my Noppin fees) but doesn't provide any of the autograph or memorabilia cards that are the main attraction of the Genesis set.  But I had my reasons - four of them as it turned out - that I'll get into in a minute.

The base set consists of 120 cards - 108 player cards plus 12 checklist cards.  So that's 9 player cards per team plus a checklist card.  The player cards are numbered 1 to 108 and the checklists are separately numbered CL01 to CL12.

Because it's released in mid-September, a month or so after 2nd Version came out, Genesis obviously goes to press a little later than 2nd Version.  In fact the backs of the cards include statistics for the season up to June 19.  This gives BBM a chance to include in Genesis some foreign players who may not have made their debut in time to be in an earlier set.  This year there are four players who appear in Genesis but do not appear in any other BBM issue so far this year (although they may show up in the yet to be released Fusion set) - Wily Mo Pena and Roel Santos of the Marines, Xavier Batista of the Carp and Chris Marrero of the Buffaloes.  Getting cards of the four of them is why I decided to pull the trigger on the set this year.  The other players in the set are pretty much who you'd expect - Shohei Ohtani, Seiya Suzuki, Yuki Yanagita, Takehiro Arai, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh, Tetsuto Yamada, Takehiro Norimoto, Tomoyuki Sugano and Hayato Sugano among others - plus several of the major rookies from this season - Sosuke Genda, Yota Kyoda, Haruhiro Hamaguchi and Chihaya Sasaki for example.  There are no manager cards in the set.

The cards themselves are pretty attractive (although they don't scan well at all).  I generally prefer borderless cards but that's not what these are.  They have a small photo taking up maybe 75% of the front of the card floating in a sea of white and bordered by gold curlicues.  Somehow I still like them.  Here's some examples (again - they don't scan well):

#061

#031

#106

#052

#041

#008

#024

#085

#073

#071

 Here's what the back of the cards looks like:

#010

Here's what the checklist cards look like - this is obviously one of the least imaginative things BBM has ever done.  And I think this is pretty much what the checklist cards have looked like every year that Genesis has been published (since 2012):

#CL12

One odd thing about the checklist cards is that they are much thicker than the player cards.  I suspect that this is to make it harder to figure out if a pack holds a memorabilia card or not but I could be mistaken.

I'm not sorry I picked this set up but I'm not going to commit to getting it next year.  It'll be interesting to see if the four players that drove me to pick up the set show up in the Fusion set in November - if I'd known BBM was going to do that set again this year I might have skipped this one until I saw who was in Fusion.

UPDATE - forgot to mention that you can see all the cards (in much better scans than mine) at Jambalaya.