Saturday, February 16, 2019

Happy New Year!

I know it's mid-February but to me the new year doesn't really start until the new baseball cards start coming out.  I know that here in the States the new Topps cards hit the streets a few weeks ago but the "flagship" cards in Japan won't be out until right around the start of the baseball season. But at least the card companies have made announcements about them so we know what to expect:

- Calbee's first of their three expected Series will be released around March 25th.   This set appears to be following their established pattern from the past few years.  The base set contains 98 cards - 72 player cards (six per team), 22 "Title Holder" cards and four checklist cards.  There are two premium subset/insert sets - a 10 "Legend" set for players who retired in 2017 and the standard 24 card "Star" set.  There's also a special box set called something like "Strike Card" which contains a card for the strikeout leader from each of the 12 NPB teams.  The checklist is available on-line here.

- The 2019 edition of BBM's 1st Version set will be released in early April.  Last year Epoch put out a flagship set that had more player cards in it than BBM's 1st Version set and I'd been curious to see how BBM would react to that challenge this year.  It turns out that they didn't really change a damn thing.  For the fifth year in row the base set will contain 372 cards - 324 player cards (27 per team), 12 team checklist cards and 36 "Cross Sunrise" subset cards - this last is a cross set subset that will be completed in 2nd Version in August.  There's the usual assortment of signature parallels for 108 of the player cards (9 per team) plus parallel versions of the rookie cards.  BBM is also doing "secret" versions of 12 cards again (1 per team) - these are a short printed  photo variation parallel.  There are four 12 card insert sets - "Japanism", "Beginning", "Dominator" and "3D Cross Sunrise" - this last one is limited to 25 of each card.  The usual autograph and memorabilia cards are available as well.

- BBM's first two "comprehensive" team sets have been announced as well.  The base set of both the Swallows and Marines sets are still 81 cards as has been standard for BBM since 2015.  However the Swallows set has 70 "regular" cards for the players and manager while the Marines set has 72 "regular" cards - these numbers are higher for this than they've been in the recent past so it's possible that BBM is now including the ikusei players for each team which they haven't done for a while so this might be a response to Epoch which had included ikusei players last year in their team sets.  The remainder of the cards in the base sets fall into a couple subsets.  Each set has a number of insert sets - there's a total of 30 insert cards for the Swallows set split among five sets including a 12 card "Phantom" set while there's a whopping 36 insert cards for the Marines set split among five sets including an 18 card "Phantom" set.  There are autograph cards available with each set and there's a special "Mysterious Fish" stamp card available with the Marines set.  Both sets will be out in early April.

- Hits is back for 2019.  They are doing a team set of "mini colored paper" for the Baystars.  There's 12 "cards" in the base set and each "card" has a gold facsimile signature parallel.  The set will be out on April 6th.

2 comments:

SumoMenkoMan said...

How do you find out about the secret versions and what they look like?

NPB Card Guy said...

I did a post on the ones from 2017's 1st Version a couple years back. You can tell which cards have the secret versions by looking for an empty circle icon next to a card on the team checklist. As for telling which of two cards is the secret one, I haven't figured out a way to do that. If you open up a case of cards then I'd expect you to have a lot less copies of the secret version. But since that's not the most practical way to do it I end up just seeing what gets listed as the secret version with either Jambalaya or on Yahoo! Japan Auctions.

One general rule of thumb though is that the more interesting photo is more likely to be the secret version.