August And Everything After

Here's a quick roundup of some sets coming out in the next two months:

- 2019 is the 70th Anniversary of the "two league system" in Japan - following the 1949 season the eight team Japan Baseball League (JBL) became the 15 (which eventually shrank to 12) team Nippon Professional Baseball organization split into the Central and Pacific Leagues.  One of the new teams added in 1950 was the Taiyo Whales who eventually became today's Yokohama DeNA Baystars.  BBM is issuing a 70th Anniversary set for the team.  This will be a pack based set with a base set of 90 cards - 7 "Team History" cards, 71 cards for OB players and 12 cards for players on the current team.  There's also a nine card "Best 9" insert set and the usual autograph cards galore.  This is BBM's first team Anniversary set since last year's Hawks 80th Anniversary set and will be the first time they've done an OB team set they've done that covers the pre-Yokohama years of the franchise (other than the small 2015 Whales Achievement box set).  Based on BBM's previous ON team sets I would anticipate that the bulk of the players showing up in the set will be from the 1970's and later.  The set will be out in mid-August.

- I had been thinking lately that it was odd that BBM hadn't put out one of their expensive team box sets this year yet.  The key word there apparently was "yet" as last week BBM announced a box set for the Carp called "Brilliant".  The 29 card set will retail for 10000 yen (~$92) and will contain a 27 card base set, an insert card (a serially numbered "Dazzling" card) and a "special" insert card (a serially numbered autographed card).  The set will hit the stores in late August.

- BBM's annual high end set - Genesis - will be out in mid-September.  As usual the base set will have 108 player cards (9 per team) plus 12 team checklists and as usual no one will really care because the base set is pretty much a superfluous part of this set.  Each of the player cards will have serially numbered parallel versions although they aren't specified on BBM's website - they're usually some sort of color thing on the front of the card.  There are three 12 cards "High Grade" insert sets - "Elite Of Nine" (some sort of plastic card), "Cross Sunrise" (holographic processing?) and "Game Changer" (some sort of 3D card).  The main draw of Genesis is the memorabilia/autograph cards and this set has them in abundance as usual - including "booklet" cards with multiple players featured.  Each box contains 20 packs containing five cards each and retails for 12,000 yen (~$107).  Each box is guaranteed to contain one memorabilia/autograph card.

- Speaking of expensive boxes, Epoch is releasing their latest ultra high-end set in conjunction with the OB Club on August 31st.  Each box of "Career Achievement 2019" will retail for 16,200 yen (~$150) and will contain six cards, at least one of which is an autograph card.  The base set is 41 cards and there's a 25 card "Holo Spectra" insert/parallel set.  There's a plethora of autograph cards available including a large number of "1 of 1" cards.

- Dan Skrezyna is publishing his latest "Foreign Attack" set under his "Vittum" label.  Since the official KBO sets the past few years have not featured any foreign players Dan's been issuing these home brew sets to fill in the gaps.  His previous two sets were for the 2016 and 2017 foreigners and this new one is for the 2015 ones.  The set contains 41 cards and Dan is selling it for $18.  He's only printing 20 so if you are interested in one you won't want to wait - you can contact him through either of the links above.  I think Dan is also planning a 2018 set this year but I don't know anything more about it.