Ending The Year On A High-End Note...

I was a little premature a few weeks back when I announced what I thought were the last of the 2018 card issues.  Turns out there were a few more coming out, all of which fall into the "ultra high end" category.

- It's been 15 years now since the Fighters abandoned Tokyo for Sapporo and Epoch is commemorating this by issuing a combination active/OB player set called "Fighters Season Achievement & 15th Anniversary Legends".  Each six card box runs around 15,000 yen.  The base set contains 57 cards - 36 active players and 21 OB players (which includes Shohei Ohtani but not Yu Darvish I think).  Each base card has at least one parallel version.  There's also a 24 card "Holo Spectra" insert set (don't know if Ohtani is included in that) that also has parallel versions.  Each box will contain 2 "special" insert cards (I think at least one of them is an autograph card).  Each player in the set has two possible autographed cards (horizontal and vertical versions).  There's also 2 possible multi-player autograph cards and six different types of memorabilia cards (uniform, patch, number, letter, foil signature with uniform) - there's six cards for each type so there's 36 different memorabilia cards total.  I assume everything's got a serial number on it but I don't know what they're limited to.  The set will be out on December 15th.

- Epoch's latest collaboration with the OB Club will also be released on December 15th.  This set is called something like "Batting Leaders" and will retail for 16,000 yen for a six card box.  The base set has 33 cards.  As you might expect from the set's name all the players included are OB batters, including Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura and Tuffy Rhodes.  28 cards from the base set have a parallel versions.  Each box contains at least two autograph cards - there are three different types of on-card autograph card and two different types of autographed ball card.

- Epoch is releasing their fifth "Stars & Legend" set for the year - this one is for the Tigers.  A six card box retails for 15,000 yen (although Discount Niki has it for 13,300) - at least one of those cards will be an autographed card.  The base set contains 32 cards - 23 for active players and nine for OB players.  There's a parallel version of each base set card that is serially numbered to 10.  There's four or five different types of autograph cards available plus a multi-player autographed booklet.  There's also a variety of memorabilia cards available including ones featuring more than one player.  The set will be out on December 29th.

- Not to be left out, BBM is issuing their own ultra high end set.  This is the third year in a row that they have issued one of these in December and this is the second year in a row that it's being called "Glory".  Boxes retail for 15,000 yen and like the Epoch sets only contain six cards (which is guaranteed to include an autograph card and a memorabilia card).  The base set has 36 cards and of course there's a parallel version of each one.  The set only contains cards of active players.  There's two insert sets - "Golden Greats" (36 cards) and "Glorious 3D" (12 3-D cards) - and a variety of possible autograph and memorabilia cards.  The memorabilia cards include "bat grip end" cards, patch cards and multi-player jersey cards.  The set will be released in late December although the cards will be labeled as 2019 cards.

- Also not be left out, Daewoo Media is issuing a high end KBO set in the near future.  I don't have many details about the set but it's called SCC Premium.  What I do know about the set I learned from this tweet from Dan Skrezyna (who else?) - the set will have 150 "Normal" cards, 60 "Rare" cards, 30 "Holo" cards and 30 "Facsimile Autograph" cards along with 10 Jersey cards (serially numbered to 30), 10 "Hidden Holo" cards (numbered to 30) and 250(!) autograph cards (numbered to 5).