2021 Calbee Series Two

Calbee's Series Two set was released a couple weeks back.  As the name implies, this is Calbee's second of three expected sets this year.  Like Series One which came out back in March, the base set contains 88 cards - 72 "regular" cards for the players, 12 "Opening Pitcher" cards and four checklist cards.

The 72 player cards break down to six per team.  Since this is effectively only a third of the complete Calbee set, all the stars are not included in this set.  It does include a number of big names, however, including Munetaka Murakami, Yudai Ohno, Yuki Yanagita, Kodai Senga, Sho Nakata, Hiroya Miyagi, Masataka Yoshida, Takeya Nakamura, Yuki Matsui and Kazuma Okamoto.  There are three rookies in the set - Teruaki Sato, Shugo Maki and Takahisa Hayakawa (technically Miyagi's a rookie but I mean 2020 draft picks).  I was surprised to discover there were two players in the set that did not appear in either BBM's 1st Version or Epoch's NPB sets - Yuma Tongu of the Buffaloes and Kazuto Taguchi of the Swallows.

I have my usual gripes (as does Sean) about the photo selection of the player cards - too many shots of "batters batting, pitchers pitching and catchers catching" - although there are a few good variations on those themes.  There are five player cards that use a horizontal format which is five more than Series One had.  Here's some example cards:

#135

#108

#083

#123

#076

#127

The twelve "Opening Pitcher" cards feature the Opening Day starting pitchers for each of the 12 NPB teams.  This includes Tomoyuki Sugano, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Kona Takahashi, Hideaki Wakui and Daichi Ohsera along with Shintaro Fujinami:

#OP-08

The four checklist cards feature highlights from the early part of the 2021 season.  There's a card showing Kona Takahashi and Tomoya Mori of the Lions doing the post-game "hero interview" after Seibu's Opening Day win, Dayan Viceido of the Dragons hitting a two run home run in the Dragons' Opening Day victory, Takyuki Kishi of the Eagles waving to the crowd after pitching a shutout against the Marines on March 30th and Baystars manager Daisuke Miura celebrating after his first managerial win on April 4th.  Here's the card of Takahashi and Mori:

#C-05

As always you can see the complete set along with the "Star" insert cards and the limited "Run Leaders" box set available from Calbee's Amazon.co.jp store over at Jambalaya.