I'm finishing up the review of 2024's card releases in Japan (and Korea) with everything that wasn't done by BBM, Epoch, Calbee or Topps.
The big addition this year was a collectible card game called DreamOrder from the Japanese game company Bushiroad. They released a somewhat bewildering number of cards in what should probably be considered twenty unique sets. In April, they released starter decks for each team that contained 12 unique player cards in each deck. Additionally, they released the Central League and Pacific League Vol. 1 booster packs sets as pack based sets at the same time. Each of the two sets had 12 additional player cards per team plus six "tactics" cards per team that show a photo of a player from the team (although they don't identify them). Bushiroad added two Vol. 2 booster pack sets at the end of June, two Vol. 3 sets at the end of August and two Vol. 4 booster pack sets in mid-October. I think but I'm not entirely sure that the Vol. 2-4 sets were put together the same way Vol. 1 was. If so, that would imply that between the starter deck and the four booster packs, each team had 60 player cards plus 24 "tactics" cards for 84 total cards per team or 1008 cards altogether. That's not taking into account the parallels, of course. DreamOrder was the first collectible card game for NPB since Konami stopped doing the Baseball Collection cards in 2022.
Bandai did some baseball cards for the first time since 2015 or so. It was not a return of Owners League, their collectible card game, however. Instead, they teamed up with Namco to release a 36 card set of caricatures of players. he cards were given away with bags of what's basically a bar snack called "kaki no tane" which in this case are primarily soy crackers. The set was called "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection 2024".
TIC (or "Hits" or "Produce 216") did three of their "mini colored paper" or "mini shikishi" team sets this year although I think only two of them - the Hawks and Swallows - were available through the normal outlets. The third time was the Lions but the cards may have only been available through the team itself - I got two packs at the team store outside Seibu Dome in May.
Also available at the Lions store were packs of their "L Collection, Vol. 1" set, a collaboration they've done with BBM for at least the last three years. I'm still not clear about why the sets are labeled "Vol. 1" as I've never seen any other volumes. In past years, Jambalaya has listed these cards but for some reason, they didn't this year (although you can see what I pulled from the packs I bought here).
The Lions weren't the only team to pair up with one of the big card companies for a "team issued" set. The Eagles worked with Epoch on their two annual sets called "1st Version" and "2nd Version". I know that were team-issued or fan club related sets for the Marines and Hawks as well as at least one other one for the Lions and I assume that most of the other teams also had one or more sets each.
My count for the total number of NPB sets this year is 60 which is probably a little low. I'm only counting the DreamOrder stuff as one set and I'm not counting the team sets from the Lions, Marines and Hawks as they weren't "national" as opposed to the Eagles Epoch set and the Lions BBM set. I'm also not counting any of the on demand sets from Epoch or Topps. That total is the same as last year, kind of confirming that this year's releases were pretty similar to last year's.
Current and future NPB players appeared on some cards from Panini in North America as well. For the second year in a row, Tomoyuki Sugano appeared on a couple of their releases - at least the Donruss and Crusade base sets (along with a bazillion parallels of each card, of course). Also for the first time since 2020, Panini included autograph/memorabilia cards of the members of the 2023 Samurai Japan collegiate team in their USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set. The 24 players include 15 2023 NPB draft picks (including Pacific League Rookie Of The Year Natsuki Takeuchi) along with four 2024 NPB draft picks. Panini also released non-autographed memorabilia cards for the team with the box set version of the Stars & Stripes set.
Over in South Korea, SCC released three sets for the KBO. The "KBO League" set came out in mid-June, followed by the "KBO Rainbow" set in late-July. The final set, "KBO Karbon", was published at the end of October.
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