- BBM has announced four more of their annual "comprehensive" team sets. Each set has a base set of 81 cards, most of which are "regular" player cards featuring the manager and the players on the 70 man roster plus a couple subsets (which may not be fully defined yet) to fill out the set. Each set also has 18 non-premium insert cards split into a variety of sets which also may not be fully defined yet. The Treasure, Esperanza and Magical inserts are all serially numbered. (If it's not obvious, the "Regular Cards", "Treasure", "Esperanza" and "Magical" columns are the total number of those type of cards in each set.)
| Release Date | Team | Regular Cards | Subsets | Non-Premium Inserts | Treasure | Esperanza | Magical | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid June | Fighters | 68 | Newcomer(4), Main Pitcher (4), Main Batters (5) | Main Players(9), New Players(3), Promising Young Players(3), Reliable Helpers(3) | 24 | 15 | Autograph cards | |
| Mid June | Buffaloes | 68 | Orimen(5), Combination Cards(5), New Forces(3) | Main Players(9), Evolution of High School Graduate Pitchers(3), Promising Young Pitchers(3), Rookie(3) | 24 | 15 | 24 | Autograph & memorabilia cards |
| Mid June | Dragons | 69 | Year Of The Dragon(5), New Dynamics(3), Native-born Aichi Hero(4) | Go Be Brave(9), Rising Dragon(6), Bright Future(3) | 24 | 15 | 24 | Autograph cards |
| Mid June | Swallows | 69 | New Forces(4), Promising Young Sluggers(4), Veterans(3), Mascot(1) | Core Players(9), Featured Breakout Candidates(6), Rookie(3) | 24 | 15 | Autograph cards |
This brings the total number of team sets BBM has released or announced this year to ten with only the Carp and Eagles, which coincidentally are two of the three teams that Epoch has just announced sets for...
- Epoch announced two more of their "Premier Edition" team sets - the Fighters and the Carp. The Fighters set will be out on June 1st and will have 45 cards in its base set - I think nine of those are OB players. The Carp set will be released on June 29th and has a base set of 39 cards, only one of which is an OB player (looks like it's a card of manager Takehiro Arai when he was a player - Arai also has a manager card in the set). All the base cards have a "holo foil" parallel and both sets have the usual gazillion insert cards that are too numerous to list here. Both sets feature five different types of player autograph cards - "Authentic", "Star", "Rookie", "Legendary" and "Combo".
- Epoch and the Eagles are continuing their team up with what had previously been a Eagles team issued set. The Eagles 2nd Version set will be released on June 29th and will have a base set of 76 cards. This is essentially a "comprehensive" team set that not only has cards for all the players on the team's 70 man roster but also the ikusei players. There's two insert sets - a six card set that I'm not positive but I think has OB players and a seven card "Crimson Heat" set. There's a bunch of different autographed cards available and "rookie bib" memorabilia cards. There's also a special version of Epoch's ubiquitous "Gem" serially numbered insert cards.
- Topps is returning for their fourth year of doing NPB sets. Their "flagship" NPB set will be released on May 24th. Like the previous three sets, this one has a base set of 216 cards (18 cards per team) and features a design that is similar to the MLB flagship set's design. (Actually just eyeballing the sample cards in the promo materials, it looks like the design is nearly identical this year.) There's the usual plethora of parallels and five different insert sets - "Topps1959", "Superstar Blueprints", "Sokkyu", "Warp Speed" and "Sayonara!". The "Topps1959" (which I assume puts current players into the 1959 Topps design) has 24 cards while the other four have 12. There will be "featured legend" autograph cards again although they haven't announced who the players are yet - I'm assuming that again there will be no current NPB players among them, just retired players or active in MLB.
- Bandai is issuing an interesting looking food issue set in July. It's a set of 36 "metallic placards" that will be given away in packages of what I think are rice crackers. I'm assuming that there's three cards per team. What's kind of cool about these cards is that they don't have photos - they have player caricatures. While that's normally not something I'm a big fan of, I find these to be really appealing:
3 comments:
Yeah, those drawing cards are really nice.
Those player caricatures remind me of Panini Triple Play... just not as ugly. But the fact that these are a food issue makes them really cool.
Not sure I like the topps npb design with the white border. I'll wait for chrome and pick up a few packs.
The Bandai cards looks fun. I hope we can buy them like calbee chips cards at the grocery store or conbini.
What do you think of the dream order cards? They are pretty cheap and some of them have really nice photos.
Post a Comment