2024 Bushiroad Dream Order Cards

Dream Order cards are the latest collectible card game for NPB.  Produced by the company Bushiroad, the initial sets were published back in late April.  There were basically fourteen sets issued at that time - a starter deck for each of the twelve NPB teams along with a "booster pack" set for each league.  The starter decks contain twelve unique player cards along with a bunch of other cards used for game play.  The "booster pack" sets contain another twelve player cards for each team.  A player may appear in both the starter deck AND the "booster pack" set but they are distinct cards with different photos and card numbers.  The "booster pack" sets also contain six "Tactics" cards per team that have an action photo of an unidentified player on the team (although it's pretty easy to figure out who it is).  As the name implies, the "booster pack" sets are sold in packs of eight cards.  The booster packs were labeled "Vol. 1" so I guess there's an underlying assumption there that there will be updates as the season goes on.

I'm not a big fan of collectible card game cards so while I was curious about these, I didn't plan on trying to build a complete set or anything.  I ended up buying the Lions starter deck and a "booster pack" for each league.  The starter deck was 1500 yen and I think the booster packs were 500 yen a piece but I could be misremembering.

I was kind of surprised when I opened up the starter deck.  The box included a game board and detailed instructions on how to play the game (all in Japanese of course) which I had more or less expected but what I didn't expect was the number of cards in the deck - there's 48 in all!  I had mentioned earlier that there were "twelve unique player cards" in the deck - I said it that way because there's three identical copies of each player card in the deck.  The rest of the cards in the deck are split between six (five unique) "Tactics" cards (that do not have photos on them) , a "team" card and five identical "time" cards showing the team logo.  I assume these cards are used somehow in game play but I have not learned how the game is played.  Here's a photo of the contents of the box:

The first card in each team starter deck is a foil card with the player's name in gold embossed text.  For the Lions deck, that player is Sosuke Genda.  Here's his card along with a couple other cards from the deck:

#PSD05-L01 (Sosuke Genda)

#PSD05-L07 (Shuta Tonosaki)

#PSD05-L08 (Takuya Nakamura)

#PDO-04 "Infield Caution" Tactics

#TIME-L01

#TEAM-L01

All the cards in both the starter deck and the "booster packs" have the same backside:

Each "booster pack" contains eight cards.  There are five base set cards, two parallel cards and one "Tactics" card.  The parallel cards are both foil with one of them being a little fancier than the other - I'm sure there's some technical term for it but I don't know what it is.  Here are the contents of the Central League pack:

#CBP01-T11 (Seiya Kinami)

#CBP01-C10 (Ryosuke Kikuchi)

#CBP01-S07 (Masanori Ishikawa)

#CBP01-DB10 (Yamato)

#CBP01-G11 (Takayuki Kajitani)

#CBP01-G06 (Yuto Akihiro)

#CBP01-C11 (Shota Suekane)

#PD0-03 "Full Swing" Tactic (Keita Sano)

And here are the cards from the Pacific League pack:

#PBP01-T12 (Taiga Hirasawa)

#PBP01-H09 (Yuki Tsumori)

#PBP01-B10 (Koji Ohshiro)

#PBP01-L10 (Ryusei Satoh)

#PBP01-E12 (Hiroaki Shimauchi)

#PBP01-L05 (Tatsushi Masuda)

#PBP01-F08 (Naoya Ishikawa)

#PDO-05 "Outfield Caution" Tactic (Takuya Hiruma)

The photography on the player cards is decent and I especially liked the photos on the Tactic cards.  Enough so that I bought a couple at Mint Urawa, gambling that I hadn't gotten them in the pack I bought (since I didn't open the packs until I got home):

#PD0-03 "Full Swing" Tactic (Jose Osuna)

#PD0-05 "Outfield Caution" Tactic (Yuki Okabayashi)

There seems to be a big marketing push on this set.  I think almost all of the Mint stores were carrying these cards (with the possible exception of Mint Hakata) and I saw them for sale at gaming stores that I passed by but didn't stop at.  There was basically a billboard for the cards on two sides of the building directly across the street from the Akihabara Radio Hall building that houses Mint Akihabara:

There was a promotion going on with the Eagles the day I went up to Sendai.  There was a stand selling the cards outside the ballpark:

The first pitch ceremony of the game was thrown by the "Dream Order Producer" - Nobuto Kobayashi:

The best part of it all is on the way into the ballpark, I was given a Takahiro Norimoto card:

I think they were also giving away Hideto Asamura cards.  As far as I can tell, this is a promo card with no equivalent card in any of the Dream Order sets so far - Norimoto has a card in the Pacific League "booster pack" set but it doesn't look like this.