- What I'm expecting to be BBM's last release for the year is "Crown", their annual* ultra high end multi-sport set. Six card boxes of this will go on sale at the end of December for 24,200 yen (around $160). I think each box is guaranteed to include at least one autographed card. The base set will contain 48 cards, 25 of which will feature baseball players. The players are a mix of OB (Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Koji Yamamoto, Hideki Matsui, Lee Seung-Yeop, Bobby Rose, Boomer Wells, Koji Uehara, etc) and active (Yu Darvish, Munetaka Murakami, Sosuke Genda, Roki Sasaski, Yuki Yanagita, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, etc). Other sports represented in the set include sumo, pro wrestling, track & field, soccer, basketball, rugby, swimming, tennis and marathon running. There's four "High Grade Insert Card" sets associated with the set - "Velvet" (48 cards), "Jet" (48 cards), "Foil Autographed Card" (24 cards) and "Sparkling (3D)" (12 cards). I guess from the numbers that the "Velvet" and "Jet" cards are essentially parallels. Looks like the "Velvet" cards are actually made of velvet and the "Jet" cards use "jet black special paper". I assume everyone in the base set has an autographed card.
* Hey, last year and this year makes it annual, right?
- I saw this tweet from Topps Japan this morning regarding Topps Now cards for the Asian Professional Baseball Championship Samurai Japan team and two thoughts ran through my mind. The first, of course, was:
The second was "Wait a minute - if Topps has the current Samurai Japan license, how did BBM include Samurai Japan cards in the Infinity set back in October?" I can't answer that but I can talk about the cards that are up for sale on Topps' Japanese website. There are sixteen cards featuring 14 players along with manager Hirokazu Ibata. There are four cards for each game the team played in the tournament. There are two cards of MVP Makoto Kadowaki and one card each for Yuji Akahoshi, Haruka Nemoto, Shota Morishita, Chusei Mannami, Kaito Kozono, Chihiro Sumida, Teruaki Sato, Takahisa Hayakawa, Kyota Fujiwara, Yuki Nomura, Kojiro Yoshimura, Shugo Maki and Yuto Koga. As with last year's Samurai Japan Topps Now cards, Topps Japan will send these cards overseas but they are not cheap. For overseas customers, each card is 1130 yen (~$7.63) while those in Japan will have to pay tax on them so their price is 1243 yen (~$8.39). Of course, I believe that shipping in Japan is free while shipping overseas is definitely not. Unlike last year when it appeared to be a flat rate of 3900 yen regardless of how many cards you bought, it looks like the rate scales depending on how many cards you buy. I put one card in my shopping cart and it indicated that the shipping rate would be 2000 yen. I ended up buying all 16 cards and the shipping was 5170 yen ($35). My total was 23,250 which worked out to around $155 which was expensive but a little cheaper than what 16 MLB Topps Now cards would have cost in the US. The cards will be on sale on 7 PM JST on December 22 (which would be 5 AM EST that day). I do not know if they will do a full team set like they did last year. I won't be surprised if they do Topps Now cards for the two games Samurai Japan will play against a European All Star team next March in Osaka.
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