Fall Releases

I want to do a quick post to get caught up on the sets that have been announced in the last month or so.

- BBM's annual "Rookie Edition Premium" set will be released in late October.  As usual this is a box set containing 38 cards - a 36 card base set plus two "premium" cards.  The base set contains three "rookies" for each of the 12 teams - in this case "rookie" means 2020 draft pick so think Teruaki Satoh, Hiromi Itoh, Takahisa Hayakawa and Ryoji Kurabashi and not Hiroya Miyagi.  The two "premium" cards are either autograph or memorabilia cards.  It is limited to 3000 sets and unopened boxes retail for 16,500 yen ($150).

- BBM is issuing yet another in their "History" line of OB team sets.  This next one is called "Tigers History 1935-2021" and is the fifth "History" set overall and third this year.  The base set will contain 90 cards (just like the other four sets) which will be split into a "Tigers History" subset (7 cards), the Tigers OB players (71 cards) and the subset for active Tigers players (12 cards).  There are two non-premium insert sets - "Legend Of Tigers" (12 cards) and "Team Records" (9 cards) - along with four premium ones - "Phantom" (24 cards), "Cross Foil Signing" (27 cards), "Combo Cross Foil Signing" (6 cards) and "Triple Cross Foil Signing".  Note that the "Cross Foil Signing" cards have facsimile signatures - there are also real autograph cards available as well.  The set will be in stores in late October, making it three months in a row that BBM has released one of these "History" sets (the Dragons in August followed by the Marines in September).

- Baseball Magazine Sha, BBM's publisher, started publishing magazines in 1946.  BBM published a multi-sport set called "Masterpiece" in the fall of 2016 to celebrate the company's 70th Anniversary.  In the fall of each of the following years BBM published another multi-sport set called "Infinity".  Since the company is celebrating their 75th Anniversary this year, BBM has switched back to the "Masterpiece" name for this year's multi-sport set.  There isn't a great deal of information out about this year's set though - I don't know how big the set is or what the inserts are (although it looks like there will be 3D cards along with the "Phantom" cards).  It also looks like there will be autograph cards available.  The list of baseball players includes both OB and active players.  One name that pops out to me is Warren Cromartie, who hardly ever shows up in OB sets.  Other sports features in the set include professional wrestling, boxing, soccer, ice hockey, tennis, rugby, softball, judo, badminton, bowling, gymnastics, volleyball, basketball, table tennis, fencing, archery, skateboarding and horse racing.  The set will out in mid-November.

- Epoch has announced four more of their ultra high-end combination OB/active player team sets called "Stars & Legends".  The teams are the Hawks (out on October 16th), the Lions (October 30th), the Carp (November 6th) and the Giants (November 13th).  I believe that the boxes for the sets will retail for 16,500 yen ($150) and will contain four cards (and I think at least one of those is an autograph).  The Hawks base set has 44 cards, the Lions base set has 45 cards, the Carp base set has 56 cards and the Giants base set has 52 cards.  I think all the base cards are serially numbered.  Each set features the same five insert sets -  "Decomori Signature Black Vision (Gold)" (three cards each numbered to 15), "Decomori Signature Black Vision (Green)" (three cards each numbered to 5), "Decomori Signature Black Vision (Hologram)" (three 1-of-1 cards), "Gem" (six cards numbered to 15), and "Black Gem" (six cards also numbered to 15).  There's a number of different types of autograph cards available in each set and I think the Hawks and Carp sets have memorabilia cards available as well.  The Giants set has a variety of game used bat cards available.