2023 Stragglers

I was thinking the other day that since there was only about seven weeks left in the year, we'd probably heard the last of the 2023 set announcements.  But surprisingly there've been two sets announced in the last week or so and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if BBM or Epoch (or both even) snuck a set out for the Nippon Series winning Hanshin Tigers.  For now let's ignore such speculation and concentrate on the sets we know are coming out.

- Topps has announced their fourth NPB set for 2023 (and their third release in about three weeks).  It's an NPB version of the Topps 206 set.  The set uses a design that's vaguely similar to the classic 1909-11 T206 tobacco card set.  At first glance I thought this was a "mugshot" set with all the images being basically a head shot of the player but it looks like there's a variety of poses in the set.  The set will contain 216 cards in the base set which will break down (as usual) to 18 per team.  Those 18 will include the manager, 14 "key players" and the team's top three picks from the 2022 draft.  Each base set card has a "mini" parallel.  60 cards have a short printed "image variation" and there are "mini" parallels of these as well.  There's also a 36 card parallel or insert set where the background on the card is the exterior of the player's home stadium.  There are autographed cards available but as has been the norm for Topps' NPB offerings, the autographs do not include anyone currently playing in NPB, only active and former Japanese MLB players.  It's a good list though, as it includes Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro, Hideki Matsui, Masataka Yoshida and Masanori Murakami.  The cards are being sold in boxes of 36 cards for 3,080 yen.  The set will be released on December 2nd.

- in Korea, SCC is releasing another set for the KBO.  This set is called "Karbon" and has a base set of 150 cards which averages out to 15 cards per team although a couple have 16 cards while a couple others have only 14.  It looks like there's a parallel version for 51 of the base set cards and there's four insert sets - "Artistic" (10 cards), "Color Drip" (40 cards), "Marble" (40 cards) and "National Team" (15 cards).  The "National Team" cards have a "gold" parallel that's serially numbered to 5 each.  (By the way, the "National Team" in question was the team that took the gold at last year's Asian games, not this past spring's World Baseball Classic team.  I'm guessing the Asian games team had collegiate and corporate league players on it as well as professionals and these 15 cards are only the pros but I don't know that for sure.)  I think there's an autograph card and a patch card ("bronze") for all 150 players in the base set.  There are 32 "Patch Silver" cards that are serially numbered to 10 and 32 "Patch Gold" cards that are serially numbered to 5.  There are also 32 jersey cards and 50 "On Card Auto" cards.  There's two different versions of that last one - "Viva Magenta" which is serially numbered to 15 and "Shine Gold" which is 1-of-1.  The set will be released on November 16th.  (As always, Dan Skrezyna of Korean Cardboard is my source of information for this set.  Dan not only tweeted about it but he also added the checklist for it to the Trading Card Database.)