2023 BBM Icons - Samurai

BBM issues an "Icons" box set each March with a different theme each year.  Last year's theme was "Samurai" and as that name might suggest, there was a connection between the players in the set and Samurai Japan.

We'll get to that in a minute but first I want to mention that the base set is 36 cards which you could probably guess means that there will be three cards per team.  An unopened box contains the base set along with one "special" card which could be an insert card or an autographed card.  I, as always, got an opened set from Ryan so I only have the base set.

With the set being released right around the same time as last year's World Baseball Classic, it will probably come as no surprise that almost half the set are players from the Samurai Japan WBC team - Sosuke Genda, Shota Imanaga, Hiromi Itoh, Takuya Kai, Ryoji Kuribayashi, Shugo Maki, Yuki Matsui, Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto, Taisei Ota, Roki Sasaki, Ukyo Shuto, Hiroto Takahashi, Keiji Takahashi, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Soichiro Yamazaki and Atsuki Yuasa.  Note that the players are depicted in their NPB uniforms, not their Samurai Japan ones.

Most of the other 19 players in the set have suited up for a previous iteration of Samurai Japan.  Ryosuke Kikuchi played on the 2017 WBC team while Koji Chikamoto, Shuta Ishikawa, Ryoma Nishikawa and Yasutaka Shiomi were on the squad that took on Australia in a pair of friendlies in November of 2022.  Many of the other players appeared on collegiate and U-18 Samurai Japan teams before going pro.  

The set includes eight rookies, all first round picks.  BBM's webpage for the set mentions that it includes "up-and-coming young players and rookies who will be responsible for the future of Samurai Japan" and sure enough, a few of players in the set appeared on the Asian Professional Baseball Championship team last November - Takahisa Hayakawa and Shota Morishita.

The card design is pretty nice, with a kind of "sun breaking through a crack" image superimposed behind each player.  The photos have a little more variety than the standard "batters batting, pitcher pitching" poses (although there's a lot of those as usual).  Here's some examples:

#13

#34

#26

#02

#10

#24

All in all, I like the set. I think the design is less busy than last year's set and it's an interesting collection of players.  As always, you can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.