Summer Releases

I wanted to do just a quick roundup of the couple new sets that have been announced recently...

- Calbee's Series Two set will officially be released on July 6th but it's usually available a few days before that.  The base set will have 87 cards, one card fewer than expected.  There will be 72 player cards (6 per team), a 12 card "AVG Leader" subset and 3 checklist cards (this is where the missing card was taken from - usually there's four checklist cards).  After not being in Series One the "Star" insert cards have made a comeback - there will be 24 of them (2 per team).  There's also a 12 card "Wins Leaders" box set available via a "Lucky card" redemption.  The checklist for the set is available here.

- The last of BBM's annual comprehensive team sets is for the Dragons and it will be released in mid-July.  This set will have the standard sized 81 card base set that includes 69 cards for the players and manager along with three four card subsets - "The Contenders", "First Impact" and "Before Dawn".  There are also 36 insert cards split across four sets - "Front Line" (9 cards), "Boost Phase" (5 cards), "Sky's The Limit" (4 cards) and "Phantom" (18 cards).  I assume each "Phantom" card is serially numbered to 25 although the web page doesn't explicitly say that.  There's also a variety of autographed cards available.

- Epoch is coming out with two of their combination active/OB team sets under the "Stars & Legends" label, one for the Lions and one for the Tigers.  These are both examples of Epoch's ultra-high end sets as boxes for them retail for 16,500 yen (around $155) and contain four cards - although two of them will be autograph cards.  Each set will have a base set containing 47 cards split between current and OB players.  For the Lions there are 27 current players and 20 OB players and for the Tigers there are 36 and 11 respectively - although those numbers may change.  Each set has two insert sets - Gem (6 cards) and Black Gem (6 cards) - I think these are Epoch's version of BBM's "Phantom" inserts as every set appears to have them.  There's also a plethora of autographed cards available for each set.  Both sets will be released on August 1st.