- Epoch announced three more of their "Premier Edition" team sets. The new ones are for the Buffaloes, Fighters and Swallows. The Buffaloes set is the one that came out while I was on vacation on July 15th (so you can see the set over at Jambalaya) while the Fighters and Swallows sets won't be released until September 3rd and 10th respectively. The base set for all three are listed at 45 cards on their promo pages but take that with a grain of salt as the Buffaloes set actually only has a base set of 37 cards. Each card in the base set has a "holo" parallel. All three sets have the standard variety of insert sets that the other "Premier Edition" sets have had - "Regular Printed Signature" cards in various colors, "Metal Power" cards in various colors, "Time To Shine" cards in various colors, and "Decomori", "Gem" and "Black Gem" cards. All three sets also have several types of autograph cards and the Fighters set will have "bat" memorabilia cards. This brings the total number of "Premier Edition" team sets for 2022 to eight, one less than the number of "Rookies & Stars" sets that they did last year. For whatever reason, they haven't done the Hawks this year after doing them last year. They also have not done sets for the Marines, Eagles or Giants.
- Epoch has also announced the first of their ultra-high end combination active/OB player "Stars & Legends" team sets for the year. It's for the Hawks, oddly enough - the one team they did a "Rookies & Stars" set for last year but didn't do a "Premier Edition" set for this year. Boxes containing four cards will sell for 18,700 yen (~$140) - I believe one of the cards is guaranteed to be an autograph. The base set will contain 50 cards (all of which I believe are serially numbered) along with five insert sets - "Decomori Signature (Gold)" (three cards each numbered to 25), "Decomori Signature (Green)" (three cards each numbered to 5), "Decomori Signature (Hologram)" (three 1-of-1 cards), "Gem" (six cards numbered to 15), and "Black Gem" (six cards also numbered to 15). There's also six different types of autograph cards - "Authentic", "Star", "Legendary", "1-of-1" and "Baseball" (which I think are on a cut up piece of a baseball). The set will be out on August 27th.
- Epoch's annual box set for the Pacific League rookies called...uh... the "Pacific League Rookie Card" set will be out on August 6th. This is a 42 card box set that contains the complete 39 card base set, two foil signature parallel cards and one autographed card. The 39 cards base set contains cards for all the players drafted by the six Pacific League teams last fall (regular phase only so no ikusei players). Unopened sets will retail for 11,000 yen (about $86) - as usual if you just want the base set it should be available much cheaper.
- Topps has announced their 2022 NPB set and, like last year, there's not a whole lot of information out about it. I think it's going to be out at the end of August but I have nothing to point at to confirm that. The set is being sold in boxes containing 24 packs of 14 cards for 13,200 yen (right around $100) - or at least it WAS being sold as it's apparently sold out now. No word about the set itself although it would not surprise me if it was a 216 card set like last year's was. There are no autograph or memorabilia cards available but each base set card has the same seven parallel versions as the ones from last year - "Gold Rainbox Foil", "Rainbow Foil" (#'d to 150), "Vintage Stock" (#'d to 99), "Blue Foil" (#'d to 50), "Orange Foil" (#'d to 25), "Red Foil" (#'d to 5) and "RayFoil" (1 of 1). There are three insert sets - "Topps 1958", "Illustration Card" and "Kings Of The Craft" - but no details about them other than the parallels (all three have "Gold Foil" (#'to 50), "Orange Foil" (#'d to 25) and "Red Foil" (#'d to 5) with the "Topps 1958" and "Illustration Card" sets also having a "RayFoil" (1 of 1) parallel). I'm intrigued by the "Topps 1958" inserts as I assume these will use the 1958 Topps design - I'll be more intrigued if Topps actually uses 1958-style posed photos on the cards rather than just using the standard action shots superimposed on a color background. UPDATE - according to Discount Niki, the set will be out on September 9th.
- The first of BBM's two annual cheerleader/dance team sets - "Dancing Heroine" - will be out at the end of August. The "Hana" set will contain 80 cards for members of "Passion" (the Swallows' cheer team), "Tigers Girls", "VENUS" (Giants), "Cheer Dragons", "M * Splash!!" (Marines), "Tohoku Golden Angels" (Eagles), "Honeys" (Hawks), "Fighters Girl" and "Blue Legends" (Lions). As always I do not know why the Buffaloes and Baystars cheerleaders don't appear in these sets (the Carp do not have cheerleaders). There are parallel versions of the base set cards and randomly inserted autographed cards. I'd expect that the second set - "Mai" - will be released about a month later.
- BBM has announced that this year's edition of their high end Genesis set will be out in late September. As usual the base set is 120 cards - 108 player cards and 12 thick team checklists and as usual no one cares about the base set. There's the usual plethora of memorabilia, patch and autographed cards with a special focus on Roki Sasaki (the web page specifically says that "Roki Sasaki Fever has also attacked Genesis) - he apparently has a signed ball card, an autographed jersey booklet, a combo booklet autograph with Kou Matsukawa and "super patch" cards for the home and away jerseys and cap. Besides the autograph and memorabilia cards, each card in the base set has several parallel versions and there's three 12 card insert sets - "Elite Of Nine", "Game Changer" and "Cross Grotto". I think the insert cards are all serially numbered to 50 but I'm not positive.
- Speaking of Roki Sasaki, BBM is issuing a set called "Roki Sasaki Perfect Game" to (obviously) commemorate his perfect game back in April. This will be a 19 card box set and as you can probably guess that's an 18 card base set plus one "special" card. The base set will highlight the various records Sasaki set that day along with the highlights of the game and will have 15 cards of Sasaki, two cards of Kou Matsukawa and one card of both Sasaki and Matsukawa. The "special" card could be any of a number of different things - one of three 3D cards, one of eight "Pitcher Perfect" cards featuring players who have thrown a perfect game (Sasaki, Hideo Fujimoto, Masaichi Kaneda, Yoshiro Sotokoba, Yoshimasa Takahashi, Soroku Yagisawa, Yutaro Imai and Hiromi Makihara), one of two "legendary foil sign" cards (for Fujimoto or Kaneda - these are facsimile signed), one of 18 "special foil sign" cards (I think these are parallels of the base set), a Sasaki autograph card, a "legendary autograph" card for either Sotokoba, Takahashi, Yagisawa, Imai or Makihara, or memorabilia cards for Sasaki, Matsukawa or both Sasaki and Matsukawa. The set retails for 5500 yen ($40-ish) and will be out in late August.
- BBM has announced two more sets in their "History" line of OB team sets - this time it's the Swallows and Hawks being commemorated. Both sets will have 90 card base sets that will break down into three categories - "Team History" (7 cards for the Swallows and 8 for the Hawks), "OB Players" (71 cards for the Swallows and 70 for the Hawks) and "Active Players" (12 cards for each set). I assume "OB Players" will include not just retired players but active former players so I wouldn't be surprised to see, say, Seiichi Uchikawa in the Hawks set even though he's with the Swallows now. Both sets will have two non-premium insert sets - "Dynasty" (12 cards) and "Team Record" (9 cards) - along with the premium "Treasure" insert cards (Swallows will have nine while the Hawks will have 12). Both sets will have plenty of autographed cards available - these sets basically exist as an excuse to have autographed cards so expect the player selection to be heavily weighted to players from the 1970's and later - i.e. ones that are still around and can sign cards. The Swallows set (full title is "Tokyo Yakult Swallows History 1950-2022") will be out in late August while the Hawks set ("Fukuoka Softbank Hawks History 1938-2022") will be out in late September. Given that BBM released four "History" sets in the four months between August and November last year, it would not surprise me at all to see two more of these sets this year. The only teams that have not yet been done are the Fighters, Lions, Eagles and Baystars. Since the Eagles have only been around since 2005 and BBM did a 70th Anniversary set for the Baystars in 2019, I'm going to guess they'll do sets for the Lions and Fighters later this year (unless they decide to do a Kintetsu Buffaloes set which wouldn't surprise me).
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