I wanted to do a quick post about some recently announced/released sets. I believe that these are pretty much the last sets to be released in 2024 although there's probably one more coming which I'll mention below.
- BBM's ultra high end multi-sport set "Crown" is back for the third year. BBM's web page is a little light on details but there's more information at the Trading Card Journal. Six card boxes for this set will retail for 25,300 yen or about $165. Each box is guaranteed to contain an autograph. Every card is serially numbered (although I don't know what the counts are to). The base set has 48 cards and there are four insert sets - "Velvet" (48 cards), "Jet" (48 cards), "Foil Autographed Card" (24 cards) and "Sparkling (3D)" (12 cards) - along with the autographed cards. The baseball players in the set include OB players like Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Kimiyasu Kudoh, Alex Ramirez, Kenji Johjima and Kosuke Fukudome and active players like Yu Darvish, Yuki Yanagita, Hayato Sakamoto, Munetaka Murakami and Chusei Mannami. The set also includes athletes from soccer, basketball, rugby, table tennis, badminton, "athletics", marathon, swimming, skate boarding, fencing, speed skating, figure skating, sumo, boxing and wrestling. The set will be out in late December.
- As I pretty much expected, Topps' Japanese website is selling Topps Now cards for the Samurai Japan team for the Premier 12. Seven cards went on sale on Friday (I think) for the first two games of the tournament and another seven went on sale today for the final three games of the opening round. It looks like the cards will be on sale for a month so the first seven will be available until December 22 and the other seven will be available until Christmas. I expect there will be additional cards for the Super Round added in the next couple days although it's unlikely there'll be one for the finale (since there really wasn't any highlights in that game for Samurai Japan). Each card is 1342 yen ($8.72) if you live in Japan but only 1220 yen ($7.92) if you're in the States (since you don't have to pay taxes on it). Of course, if you're in the States, you have to pay for shipping and that's at least 4000 yen or about $26. I'm not sure if there's a shipping charge in Japan. I think that there might have been six cards issued for the warm up games Samurai Japan played against the Czech Republic the weekend before their group in the Premier 12 started but I missed them - they must not have been on sale for very long. I do expect to see Topps offer a 30-ish card team set for the Premier 12 squad as well before the end of the year.
- Speaking of the Premier 12, there's apparently a card set for the cheerleader/dance squad that appeared between innings in the games in Taiwan. Jambalaya has a listing for the "CT Amaze & Premier 12 Stars" set. I don't know any real details about the set other than it appears to have a 70 card base set and a 45 card insert set. Not sure if it's generally available in Japan or if Jambalaya imported it from Taiwan.
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