- The October release (on the 26th to be exact) is for the Epoch NPB Luxury Collection. This is the third year that Epoch has issued this set and this year's edition appears to be following the pattern of last year's set rather than the 2022 edition which was essentially a Chrome-ish parallel version of a quarter of that year's NPB set. This year's set features 108 cards (18 more than last years set) but I don't know if they will be evenly split up between the 12 teams (last year's set was unusual in that it wasn't). It appears from the sample images on the web page that the set will use the same design as this year's NPB set but the photos will be different. The 108 cards are split between 72 rookies (which I think is the entire 2023 draft class), 33 current players and 3 OB players. Each card has six parallels (including ones that are /10, /5 and 1-of-1). There's also a number of insert cards and a bunch of autographed cards. The autographed cards include at least five OB players (Sadaharu Oh, Ichiro, Kenji Johjima, Hiroki Kuroda and Kazuhiro Sasaki so there's obviously autographs for players who don't appear in the base set. I don't know if that's the case for active players as well.
- Epoch is releasing their annual Pacific League Premier Edition set on November 9th. This is one of their ultra high-end sets - boxes for the set will retail for 16,000 yen (about $112) and contain six cards. I'm not positive but I assume at least two of those six cards are guaranteed to be "special cards" which may include autographed and/or memorabilia cards. The base set has 54 cards - nine cards for each of the six Pacific League teams. Again there are a number of insert cards and autographed, memorabilia and autographed memorabilia cards available.
- The latest of Epoch's ultra high-end active/OB player "Stars & Legends" team sets will be for the Marines and has the somewhat unwieldy title of "Chiba Lotte Marines Stars & Legends with Memorabilia". Boxes of this product retail for 20,000 yen (about $140) and I think contain just four cards - although two of them are likely "special insert cards". The base set has 55 cards - 31 active and 24 OB players - and there's a serially numbered parallel version of each base set card. There's Epoch's usual collection of insert cards, five different types of autographed cards and seven different types of memorabilia cards. All the memorabilia cards appear to be fragments of bats. The set will be released on November 23th.
- BBM's annual Rookie Edition Premium box set will be out on November 2nd. As is standard, each box will contain 38 cards - the 36 card base set plus two "premium insert cards". The 36 cards in the base set are split evenly among the 12 teams and feature the top three "rookies" for each team - with "rookie" in this case meaning "2023 draftee". The "premium insert cards" are autographed and memorabilia cards which explains why unopened boxes retail for 15,000 yen (around $105). Or you can buy just the base set in an opened box for less than 1000 yen.
-The Hawks clinched their first Pacific League pennant since 2020 this past week and BBM is commemorating the event with a special box set called "Hawks - Fly Again". This is the first time that BBM has issued a box set commemorating a pennant winner since 2018 although it used to be pretty standard for them. Each box will contain the 45 card base set plus one "premium insert card" which could be an autographed card as well as a "foil sign" card. The base set has 27 "regular" player cards, nine cards with highlights from the season (I'll be curious if their 21-0 shellacking of the Eagles that I witnessed will make this subset) and nine "update" cards (my term, not BBM's). The "update" cards are listed as "registered players under control after March" which I think are development players (ikusei) who the Hawks brought onto their 70 man roster in March or later. According to the roster, though, there's only eight of them which may mean that the ninth player is Jeter Downs, who signed with the team at the end of July (and made his ichi-gun debut this past week). The "update" cards will use the format of the 2024 BBM Hawks set. The box set retails for 4400 yen ($31) will be released in mid-November.
- The annual set that's recently become the final BBM baseball set each year - Fusion - will be released at the end of November. As always, this is a multi-headed Frankenstein of a set with five distinct parts of its base set. There's a 20 card "1st Version Update" subset which will feature players who did not appear in either the 1st Version set or the similarly named subset in the 2nd Version set - the website says this will include Haruto Takahashi and Ayumu Ishikawa but I'm guessing it'll also have Dallas Keuchel. There's a single card "Rookie Edition Update" which I'm guessing will be for Shosei Takahashi, the Swallows first pick in last year's ikusei draft who didn't graduate high school until June and, as such, did not appear in this year's Rookie Edition set. There's the standard 99 card "Hall Of Records" subset which basically functions as a season review although it contains cards for both active and OB players - the active players are included for doing something this season and the OB players are included for doing something related to what the active players did. If this sounds confusing, it's because it kind of is. There's a 24 card "Title Holders" subset with the league leaders in a bunch of different categories. There's also a short-printed "Ceremonial First Pitch" subset that BBM has not announced the size of yet which means I can't tell you how many cards the base set has in it. All I can say is it's at least 144. There's also the usual insert sets - the 24 "Great Records" cards which highlight milestones reached by players, the 12 "Legendary Player" cards which feature one OB player from each team and the serially numbered premium inserts of "Treasure" (12 cards) and "Esperanza" (24 cards). There are also autographed cards available for both the active and OB players.
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