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:
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| #PSD05-L01 (Sosuke Genda) |
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| #PSD05-L07 (Shuta Tonosaki) |
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| #PSD05-L08 (Takuya Nakamura) |
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| #PDO-04 "Infield Caution" Tactics |
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| #TIME-L01 |
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| #TEAM-L01 |
All the cards in both the starter deck and the "booster packs" have the same backside:
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| #PD0-03 "Full Swing" Tactic (Jose Osuna) |
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| #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.
8 comments:
Bushiroad's usually keeps to anime/manga franchises when they want to pump out a card game so I'm a little surprised they tried their hand at live action sports (especially after the last several attempts ended in failure and not even arcade games or mobile apps can survive anymore) but good luck to them I guess.
I've been thinking of buying one of those. You are right about the marketing push, I think the ads might have been taken down by the time of your visit but the Nagoya subways had ads for them all over the place in April.
I'd like to buy them to actually play the game with my son, but its kind of hard to get him into it now that he has Pro Yakyu Spirits for the Switch.....
Those are pretty legit. I wish they would do something like this for sumo!
@Zippy Zappy - I need to do a post on the history of collectible card games for NPB at some point. Not to sound too much like the grouchy old man I am, but is there some reason they have to have such confusing checklists?
@Sean - the ads were probably still up - I just kind of stopped noticing them after a while. I kept hoping there'd be a promotion going on at another park where I'd get another free promo card but it never happened.
@NPB Card Guy
Unfortunately baseball card game checklists tend to always be at least a little bit messy thanks thanks to parallel foils being commonplace and the need for additional non-player game pieces, but I think Bushiroad's is unfortunately even more obtuse than normal.
The commons, rares, and super rares all have different amounts of parallels separated in different tiers and all have unique rarity names. Then, there are a ton of sets already thanks to each starter deck counting as a separate set. Also, there are a ton of support, team, and time cards that have the same collector number but feature different teams/players/mascots on them. It feels like making the game as collectible as possible was a much higher priority than making a coherent checklist. If anything, it encourages people to look up cards on their proprietary database.
Anyway, I hope to see that history of NPB card games sometime since it's something I'm looking into myself. I'm at least basically familiar with Takara Baseball Card Game, Field of Nine, Dream Stadium, Prime Nine, Powerful Pro Yakyuu, some of the arcade games and of course this one, so let me know if you need pictures/info from some of these or if there are some games I missed.
@SRC - thanks for the details. Not sure when I'm going to get to the history post since I have a lot of posts about my trip to get to first. The ones I'm familiar with are Takara, Konami (Field Of 9, Prime Nine, etc), Power League (is that Dream Stadium?), Bandai (Owners League) and now Bushiroad's Dream Order. I find Konami's stuff in particular to be very confusing - so many different sets.
Out of curiosity, do you know if thee there "rare" cards in these sets? Like, is it worth in any way buying more than one set to get a signed card, jersey card etc? Guessing not...it's an interesting concept as a game, even if not the most 'collectible' per-say (at least to me)
I don't think there are any autographed or memorabilia cards available. I think the big pulls are the foil parallels and such
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