More Summer Sets

I wanted to do another quick round up on some recently announced sets:

- BBM's final "comprehensive" team set for 2021 is for the Tigers and is being released...checks notes...today, I think.  Like the other team sets, the base set contains 81 cards.  These 81 cards include 71 cards for the manager and players, three "Set The Tone" cards, four "Big Blast" cards and three "Headlines" cards.  There are 18 non-premium insert cards split into three sets - "Wild Attack" (nine cards), "Sparkle" (five cards) and "Sonic Boom" (four cards) - along with 54(!) premium insert cards also split between three sets - "Phantom" (24 cards), ""Esperanza" (15 cards) and "Hyakka Ryoran" (I think) (15 cards).  There's also a lot of autograph and memorabilia cards available.

- Genesis, BBM's annual high end set, will be released in late-September.  As usual, it's base set contains 120 cards - 108 player cards (nine per team) plus 12 team checklist cards - and as usual, no one really cares about the base set.  The big draws of Genesis are the billion parallels of the base set cards, the premium insert cards ("Elite Of Nine", "Game Changer" and "Cross Torrent") and the autograph and memorabilia cards.  The memorabilia cards include "super patch" and "grip end" cards.  There are both memorabilia and autograph cards that feature multiple players.  There are also signed ball cards and buyback autograph cards along with "booklet" autograph cards.

- Just a month after they release the "Dragons History" set, BBM's releasing another OB team set using the "History" theme, this time for the Chiba Lotte Marines.  The base set for the "Marines History 1950-2021" set will have 90 cards split up into seven team history cards, 71 cards for OB players and 12 cards for active players.  There will also be nine "Team Record" insert cards, three "New Era" insert cards and 12 premium "Phantom" insert cards along with a bevy of autographed cards.  I'm kind of excited about this set as it's including a period of time that's not been covered with any of the previous OB sets for the Marines.  The two earlier sets were for the 40th Anniversary of Lotte buying the team in 1968 and for the 20th Anniversary of the team's move to Chiba in 1992 so the Mainichi/Daimai/Tokyo Orion era for the team has not previously been included.  The set will be out in mid-September. 

- Epoch has announced the latest two of their ultra high-end "Stars & Legends" team sets.  These will be for the Fighters and Swallows.  The boxes for these will retail for 16,500 yen (around $150) and contains four cards - one of which I believe is guaranteed to be an autographed card.  As the name of the sets might suggest, each set contains cards of both active and OB players from the team.  The Fighters set will have a base set of 52 cards - 36 active players (including manager Hideki Kuriyama) and 16 OB players.  The Swallows base set has 51 cards split between 38 cards for active players (and the mascot) and 13 cards for OB players.  Both sets will include Epoch's ubiquitous six card "Gem" and "Black Gem" insert sets.  The Swallows set at least also has a three card insert set called "Decomori Signature Black Vision".  Both sets have five different kinds of autograph cards available - "Authentic", "Star", "Legendary", "Combo" and "Baseball".  There's an "Authentic" autograph for every player in the base set and a "Legendary" autograph for every OB player.  I think the "Baseball" ones are actually on pieces of baseballs.  The Fighters set will be released on August 28th and the Swallows set will be out on September 11th.