An Expensive Sadaharu Oh Set, More Team Sets And A Calbee Update

I wanted to do another quick round up of recently announced sets plus give an update on Calbee Series One.

- Epoch released the "Sadaharu Oh Legendary Career Super Luxury Baseball Card Collection" today.  To say this is an expensive set is a gross understatement.  I haven't been able to find the MSRP price for it but I did find someone selling an unopened box on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for 500,000 yen or about $4200.  Each box contains only four cards but one of them is guaranteed to be an autographed card.  There's about 20 different autographed cards available, all of which are serially numbered and all of which have a print run of six or less.  There are parallel versions of them also which are numbered to either 1 or 2.  There are four types of autographed booklets which are numbered to 4 or 5, three of which have parallel versions numbered to 1 or 2.  The "base set" (and I use that term loosely) contains 20 cards - each card is serially numbered to 14, 15 or 20.  Each card in the "base set" has a 1-of-1 "Hologram Foil" parallel version.

- At the other end of the cost spectrum, Epoch has announced their first "reasonably" priced team set for 2022.  Epoch's low end team sets have been evolving over the past five years.  They've been issued under the label "Rookies & Stars" and started out in 2018 as "comprehensive" team sets - meaning that they contained cards for all the players on team's 70 man roster (as well as the ikusei players for a couple of the teams).  Epoch shrunk the sets to 36 cards starting in 2020 so they only featured about half of the roster.  For 2022 they have apparently ditched the "Rookies & Stars" tag in favor of "Premier Edition".  The first of these is for the Carp and will be released on April 30th.  The base set will grow to 45 cards although it looks like three of those cards will be for OB players.  Each card in the base set has a "Hologram" parallel and there's a boatload of insert cards - "Regular Printed Signature" cards in various colors, "Metal Power" cards in various colors, "Time To Shine" cards in various colors and the standard inserts Epoch has been doing for the past few years - "Decomori", "Gem" and "Black Gem".  There also will be a number of different autograph cards available.

- BBM announced two more of their annual "comprehensive" team sets - the Dragons and the Marines.  Both sets feature an 81 card base set and 18 "non-premium" insert cards along with a bunch of premium insert cards and autograph cards.  The Dragons' base set breaks down to 66 cards for the players and manager along with three poorly defined subsets - a three card one that I think is for established players, a six card one for young players and another six card one labeled something like "hot topics this season".  The 18 insert cards are split among three similarly ill defined sets - nine cards for "main players", five cards for "growing young dragons" and four cards for rookies.  On the premium insert side there are 24 "Antique" cards, 19 "Treasure" cards and 15 "Esperanza" cards.  The Marines' base set has 67 cards for the players and manager, a two card "Newcomer" subset, a five card "Titleholder" subset, a four card "Back Number Genealogy" subset and a three card subset labeled "Young & Fine".  The 18 insert cards are not well defined - nine cards for "main players", three cards for "expected rookies", three cards for "moment of fulfillment" and three cards for "reliable veterans".  There's also 24 "Treasure", 15 "Esperanza" and 24 "Antique" cards associated with the set.  The Dragons set will be out in late April and the Marines set will be out in late May.

- Last week Calbee finally released details on their Series One set that will be released next week although it's a bit confusing.  There will be the usual 72 player cards, split evenly between the 12 NPB teams.  There will be a 19 card "Title Holder" subset which will feature players who either won major awards or led their league in a major category last year (players who switched teams either domestically or internationally aren't included which I think only leaves out Robert Suarez and Seiya Suzuki this year), the ubiquitous 24 card "Star" subset, a four card "Legend" subset for retiring players (Yoshiyuki Kamei, Daisuke Yamai, Takeshi Toritani and Yuki Saitoh) and the usual four checklist cards.  There are also two (and only two) reprint cards - apparently Calbee's big deal to celebrate their 50th Anniversary is issuing reprint cards of Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh with a "kira" finish a la the "Star" cards.  I'm a little underwhelmed by this - I was expecting something a little more interesting.  The thing that's confusing about the details of the set is just the way the cards are listed on the on-line checklist - typically any subset listed between the "regular" cards and the checklist cards is considered part of the base set while anything listed after the checklist cards is considered "insert" cards.  The list for this set implies that the "Star" subset is part of the base set but I'm pretty sure the "Star" subset has always been considered an "insert" set.  I expect to discover next week that the "Star" subset (along with the "Legend" and reprint cards) are actually "insert" cards and that the base set will just be the "regular" cards, the "Title Holder" cards and the checklist cards.  Calbee also announced that the 12 card box set associated with the Series One set that's only available from Calbee's Amazon store is called "Clutch Hitters".