No baseball in Japan yet but that doesn't seem to be slowing down the card makers as a number of new team sets have been announced in the past few weeks.
- BBM has announced three more of their annual comprehensive team sets. The latest ones are for the Marines, Tigers and Eagles (leaving the Dragons as the only remaining team to not have their set announced yet). The base set for all three sets will be 81 cards. The Marines set will contain 69 cards for the manager and players (and probably the mascots as well), 7 "New Power" subset cards and 5 "Marines Ikemen 5" subset cards. It will have 18 insert cards (9 "Breakthrough" cards, 6 "Infinite Possibilities" cards and 3 "Luminous" cards) plus 18 serially numbered "Esperanza" cards and 18 serially numbered "Phantom" cards. The Tigers base set contains 70 cards for the manager and players (and probably mascots) plus 11 cards in three subsets - "Fly Now" (3 cards), "Countdown" (3 cards) and "Thunderstruck" (5 cards). It also has 18 insert cards (9 "Tiger Claw" cards, 4 "Stay Strong" cards and 5 "Ignition" cards) plus 18 serially numbered "Phantom" cards. BBM didn't give any details on how the Eagles base set breaks down or how the 18 insert cards are divided. The set will have 18 serially numbered "Phantom" cards as well. All three sets will have a smorgasbord of possible autograph cards - the Marines set will also have a "Mysterious Fish" stamp card available as well. The Marines and Tigers sets will be out in mid-June while the Eagles set will be out in mid-July.
- If you don't want to wait that long for an Eagles team set then you're in luck because the team's annual self published team set was released in late April. The base set is 81 cards which features cards of all the players on the team's 70 man roster plus cards of the ikusei players. There's a signature parallel version of each card in the base set and a 10 card insert set containing die-cut cards celebrating some milestone or award achieved by Eagles players in 2019. There are also two checklist cards that don't appear to be considered part of the base set. It looks like there are autograph and patch cards available in packs as well. The official name of the set is "Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles Baseball Card 2020 1st Version" which implies there will be a "2nd Version" set later in the year. All the cards (except the autograph and memorabilia cards) can be seen at Jambalaya.
- Epoch announced their latest "Rookies & Stars" team set - this one is for the Dragons. The base set contains 36 cards for players on the team (but not manager Tsuyoshi Yoda) and there's a parallel version for each card. The set has the same insert sets that the rest of the "Rookies & Stars" sets have - "Uniform Number" (Silver, Gold or Team Color versions), "Metal Power" (Silver, Gold, Hologram), "Time To Shine Hologram" (versions A, B and C) and the serially numbered "Gem" (regular and Black). There's also a number of autograph cards available. The set will be released on July 11th.
- In addition to the team sets from Japan, the first KBO set of the 2020 season was released a few weeks back. The "Battle Baseball Card Game Vol. 1" set contains 110 cards (11 per team) which are split between 80 "normal" cards and 30 "holo" cards - I assume the "holo" cards are short-printed. As the name says, the cards are actually part of some sort of collectible card game. Dan has put the checklist up at TradingCardDB.com although there are no scans yet. Boxes are available at Gmarket for $10-15 although shipping to the US may be problematic at the moment. Each box contains 40 packs and each pack contains 2 cards. UPDATE - I should point out that there are no autograph or memorabilia cards available with this product. I think there is some sort of chase card but I don't know the details.
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