It's only been a little over two weeks since I last did a round up of newly announced releases but Dan Skrezyna - aka Korean Cardboard - contacted me last week to let me know there were a couple new KBO releases. So I thought I'd get caught up on those as well as cover a couple newly announced NPB sets.
- SCC released "KBO Sensation" at the end of August. I think this is a higher end set. I'm a little confused about the details as Dan's post on BlueSky has different information then what he's put up on TCDB. Of course, it would help if SCC had some useful information on their website but, hey, you can't have everything. I'm going to assume what's on TCDB is the accurate information. The base set has 182 cards and there's some sort of parallel but I'm not sure if all the base set cards have parallel versions. There's six different varieties of insert cards - "Chrome" (50 cards), "Wave" (40 cards), "Impact" (40 cards), "Tropical" (10 cards), "Rookie" (33 cards with a 1-of-1 parallel) and "Rookie Of The Year" (1 card). There are also jersey cards, patch cards, sticker autograph cards and on-card autograph cards available. It looks like each box retails for 120,000 won (around $86) and is guaranteed to contain one autograph cards, one memorabilia card (either a jersey or a patch) and one "Chrome" insert card.
- About three weeks after releasing "KBO Sensation", SCC released another KBO set called "KBO Collection Plus". They put a little more detail on their website and Dan's put the information for the set up at TCDB. The set has a 115 card base set and there's two associated sets that could be considered either inserts or parallels - 52 "All Star" cards and 50 "Hologram" cards. The reason I'm a bit confused about what they should be considered is that they use the same card numbers as the base set but they use a completely unrelated design. Further confusing matters is that the "Hologram" cards have a parallel version too. 50 players also have autographed cards - both facsimile and real ones - that also use the same numbering system as the base set which is really confusing but kind of par for the course for SCC's KBO sets.
- This year's edition of "Rookie Edition Premium", BBM's annual box set for the top rookies of the season, will be released on November 1st. Each box contains 38 cards - the 36 card base set plus two "premium" insert cards. The base set contains three cards for each team which aren't necessarily the top three picks from last year's draft. (I should point out that "rookie" in this case is the baseball card definition - players taken in the 2024 draft - rather than the "eligibility for the Rookie Of The Year award" definition.) The "premium" insert cards could be autographed cards (either sticker or on-card), memorabilia cards (including patch and bat knob) and "booklets" - although I'm not sure if those have multiple autographs or multiple pieces of memorabilia (or both). As you might expect because each box has two hits, they're retailing for 16,000 yen or around $108.
- I guess that last year's "Lions Collection" box set featuring the team's alternate uniform that they collaborated with the Japanese fashion line "New Yorker on and also featuring cards of team members wearing street clothes was popular enough that BBM decided to do a similar set this year. "Lions Bouquet" is a 46 card box set that will be released towards the end of November. Each box contains the 45 card base set, a "special" insert card and one of 11 tin badges. The base set is split up into three parts - 16 "Bouquet-style" cards showing players in street clothes, 18 cards showing players in the "Lions Summer Blue" alternate uniforms and 11 "Peko-chan & player illustration" cards. Peko-chan is the mascot for the Fujiya candy company - it's a girl with pigtails. I'm not sure but I think these eleven cards are drawings and the tin badge in the box matches one of these cards. The possible "special" insert cards include foil "facsimile" autographed cards, real autographed cards, and exchange cards for memorabilia cards.
- 2025 is BBM's 35th year doing baseball cards. It will also feature the 4000th issue of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball, published by Baseball Magazine Sha, BBM's parent company, at some point this fall. To celebrate both of these events, BBM is releasing a set called something like "35th Anniversary & Weekly Baseball Issue 4000 Commemorative Special Edition" in late December. The base set will contain 240 cards, split evenly between OB players and active players - although 12 of the active player cards are for rookies and will use the 1991 BBM design. I'm assuming this set will follow the usual "same number of cards per team" format (although BBM's "25th Anniversary" set from 2015 did not) so there'll be 20 cards per team (with Kintetsu and Rakuten combined probably). The OB player list is interesting. Previous BBM anniversary sets were limited to post-1991 players but with Shukan Baseball's archives going back to 1958, it really opens up the number of players available. Some of the pre-1991 OB players include Sadaharu Oh, Koichi Tabuchi, Keishi Suzuki, Masayuki Kakefu and Suguru Egawa. The set will have three insert sets - "Cross Ocean" (24 OB players), "Dream Team" (24 active players, I assume it's using the 1998 "Dream Team" insert design like the 30th Anniversary set did) and "Combined" (12 cards with an OB player paired with an active player from the same team). There are also memorabilia cards, all of which appear to feature multiple players as there are "combo", "triple" and "quartet" ones listed. And, of course, there are autograph cards for both the OB and active players as well as ones that are listed as "Shukan Baseball Cover Autograph" which I guess is an autographed reproduction of a Shukan Baseball cover shrunk to baseball card size. I was kind of hoping that the base set cards would be reproductions of Shukan Baseball covers but I'm guessing that it'll only be for these autographed cards.
- Epoch is releasing their second of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets on November 8th (a week after their first one comes out). Three card boxes of the "Marines Stars & Legends with Memorabilia" set will retail for 16500 (about $112). The base set has 36 cards - 32 for active players (and manager Masato Yoshii) and just four for OB players (Seiya Inoue, Toshiaki Imae, Masahide Kobayashi and Tomoya Satozaki). There are three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with nine "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5. All the memorabilia cards are bat and/or batting glove cards for three 2025 rookies - Misho Nishikawa, Ryusei Miyazaki, and Yu Tatematsu. There are four varieties of individual bat cards - "core", "grip", "barrel" and "knob" - along with a card featuring a bat fragment for all three players. There are two varieties of individual batting glove cards - "piece" and "strap" - along with a card featuring a batting glove piece from all three players. There are also individual cards that feature both a bat and glove relic for each player. There are also five varieties of autographed cards available. All 36 players have an "authentic" autograph card while the four OB players also have a "Legendary" autograph card. I think the remaining autograph cards are all for the active players - "Star" (five cards), "Rookie" (six cards) and "Baseball" (20 cards). If we assume that there's no overlap between the players in each group, there's an additional autograph for 31 of the 32 active players. I'd guess that the one guy who doesn't have a second autograph card is Yoshii but I don't know that for sure.
