More Summer Releases

I wanted to do a quick post about some recent set announcements along with a quick discussion about what hasn't been announced yet.

- 2020 marks the 30th year that BBM has been publishing baseball cards so it's not a surprise that they're issuing a 30th Anniversary set to celebrate (especially since they did a 20th Anniversary set in 2010 and a 25th Anniversary set in 2015).  This is a pack based set that will have a 252 card base set that includes 108 cards for OB players (I assume 9 cards per team), 108 cards for active players (again I assume 9 cards per team), 24 "Records & Highlights" cards and 12 "Famous History" cards.  The 24 "Records & Highlights" cards apparently uses the same design as the similarly named subsets in the 20th and 25th Anniversary sets although I don't know if they only cover the past five seasons (the 25th Anniversary set's subset cards only covered 2010 to 2015) or if they will cover events over the entire 30 years since 1991.  There are six insert sets associated with the set.  BBM reached back into history for the designs for two of the sets - the 12 card "Dream Team" set uses the design of the 1998 "Dream Team" insert set and the 12 card "All Star" set uses the design of the 2002 Touch The Game "All Star" insert set.  The other insert sets are "Cross Blossom" (24 cards), "Esperanza" (30 cards), "Phantom" (18 cards) and "3D Cross Blossom" (24 cards).  I'm pretty sure that at least the "Phantom" and "Esperanza" cards are serially numbered.  There are also a variety of memorabilia and autograph cards available, including "buy back" autographed cards.  The set will be released in late August.

- I'm not sure but I think BBM is releasing their own OB/active higher end team set to compete with Epoch's "Stars & Legends" sets.  They're putting out a box set called "Swallows Legacy" that contains 37 cards - a 36 card base set plus one autographed card.  The 36 cards are split evenly between OB and active players.  The autographed card could be either an OB or active player (and could also be an active player who is not in the base set).  The set will be out in early August.  I would not be surprised to see BBM issue more team sets like this.

- For the third year Epoch is releasing a Pacific League Rookies box set.  The box contains a 37 card base set featuring all the 2019 non-ikusei draft picks by the Pacific League teams plus two parallel cards (looks like each base card has three different parallel versions) and an autographed card.  The set will be released on August 8th.

- Epoch is collaborating with the OB Club on another ultra high end set.  This one is called "Career Achievement" and six card boxes retail for 16,500 yen (~$153).  Two of those six cards are autographed cards though.  The base set contains 43 cards and there are I think three numbered parallel versions of each card.  There's five different varieties of autographed cards, all of which I think are serially numbered as well.  The set will be in stores on August 29th.

I wanted to cover some other news in this post as well.  The NPB regular season is almost three weeks old at this point and Epoch is back to publishing Epoch One cards again.  These are the Japanese version of Topps Now cards - the cards are available to order on-line and the print run for the cards are determined by the number of orders received.  The two big differences between the Epoch One and Topps Now cards are the price (Epoch One cards are 500 yen or a little less than half of the $9.99 the Topps Now cards cost) and the time period the cards are available (Epoch One cards are available for three days while Topps Now cards are only available for one day).  As has been the case for the two previous years that Epoch has been doing the Epoch One cards, Epoch is only doing these cards for a subset of the NPB teams.  They added the Baystars this year but dropped the Carp so there are still only cards for nine teams.  In addition to DeNA there are cards available for the Marines, Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Fighters, Lions, Swallows and Giants.

After four years, BBM and Nippon-Ham have stopped doing the "Home Run Sausage" cards.  I don't know if this was related to COVID-19 or just they decided that four years was enough.  It's probably a coincidence but it is interesting to note that the "Home Run Sausage" cards were issued in the same four years that the Fighters did early spring training in Arizona.

Speaking of COVID-19, I think we're finally seeing some impact of the virus on card releases.  Normally by now BBM has not only announced the details for the 2nd Version set (which is normally published in early to mid August) but they've also announced both of the "Dancing Heroine" cheerleader sets (and in fact usually published "Hana", the first earlier of the two).  I'm hoping that BBM is simply pushing 2nd Version to later in the year - maybe September - rather than cancelling it altogether but I don't know what they're planning.  I'm curious what they'll do about the "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards in it although maybe with the limited number of fans who will be admitted to games starting this weekend they'll be able to do first pitch ceremonies again.