2021 In Review - Everything Else (Including Korea)

I want to wrap up my review of the 2021 Japanese baseball card issues by going over every card release that wasn't from BBM, Calbee or Epoch.

The big news this past year was that Topps got a license to produce NPB cards.  The announcement came at the beginning of October but their first (and ultimately only) 2021 product did not hit stores until early December - a 216 card set that used a design that closely resembled the one used by Topps' 2021 MLB set.  A Chrome version of the set was originally also scheduled to be released in December but was delayed until January.

For the second year in a row, BBM and the Saitama Seibu Lions teamed up to produce a Lions team set that was sold at the Lions' team stores.  It had a 30 card base set plus a six card "Lions Heroes" insert set.

I'm still not 100% sure what their name is, but the company that goes by "TIC" or "Hits" issued four sets in 2021 - a "mini colored paper" (or "mini shikishi") team set for the Hawks and three more traditional looking team sets called "Used Ball" for the Swallows, Baystars and Hawks.

I'm sure that there are other team issued sets but the only ones I know for sure came from the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.  They put out their 1st Version set extremely early in the year - I think it was released in the first week of February.  They issued a 2nd Version set in June.  In addition, to commemorate the return of Masahiro Tanaka to Sendai after 7 years in MLB, they sold bags of potato chips with cards of Tanaka at their ballpark.

For the fourth year, Konami issued their "Baseball Collection", a collectible card game - the cards can be used in an arcade video baseball game.  I think there were a total of 900 cards issued - 75 per team - although I could have been wrong in my count.

I think the total number of Japanese sets for 2021 was 68 which is four more than in 2021 but five less than in 2019.

Over in Korea, SCC only issued two sets for the KBO.  In June they issued a set called "Rainbow" which appears to have been completely made up of serially numbered parallel cards - there's no base set.  In November they put out the more traditional "Golden Premium" set - at least "traditional" as KBO sets go.  In addition, Dan Skrezyna put out his latest "Foreign Attack" set which included all the foreign players in the KBO in 2019.