Summertime Things

Summer has arrived and I realized that I'd gone about a month and a half since I last did a roundup of new set announcements.  Time to fix that so here goes...

- Epoch has announced three more of their team sets under the "Premier Edition" label.  The Dragons set will be out on July 19th, the Buffaloes set will be out on August 16th and the Baystars set will be out on August 30th.  This will make it eight teams that Epoch has done these team sets for this year, with only the Giants, Hawks, Marines and Eagles being left out.  The Dragons set has 44 cards in its base set - 40 for active players, one for the mascot Doala and three for members of the coaching staff (I assume they'll feature photos of them from when they were active players and not coaches).  The Buffaloes and Baystars base sets are split between active and OB players with the Buffaloes set having 39 active players and three OB players and the Baystars set having 47 active players and seven OB players.  (I should mention that the "active players" group includes each team's manager as well.)  There's a "holo" parallel for every base set card in all three sets.  Each set has the same batch of inserts as all the rest of the "Premier Edition" sets - three varieties of "Regular Foil Signature" ("silver", "gold" and "hologram") (18 cards each), two varieties of "Regular Decomori Signature" ("hologram" and "hologram parallel") (18 cards each), five varieties of "Time To Shine" ("A","B","C","D","E") (six cards each) and three varieties of "Decomori Signature" ("gold","green" and "hologram") (six cards each).  I believe all of the inserts are serially numbered.  There are also the "GEM" and "BLACK GEM" "special insert cards" (twelve cards in each) that I think are much more limited.  Finally, each set has a bunch of associated autographed cards that are slightly different between the sets.  The Dragons set has 41 "Authentic Autograph" cards, four "Star Autograph" cards, eight "Rookie Autograph" cards, three "Legendary Autograph" cards, two "Combo Autograph" cards and four "Rookie Combo Autograph" cards along with an autographed card of Doala entitled "Doala's Flip".  The Buffaloes set has 39 "Authentic Autograph" cards, six "Star Autograph" cards, twelve "Rookie Autograph" cards, two "Combo Autograph" cards and an unspecified number of "Legendary Autograph" cards (but presumably three or less, assuming these are all for the OB players in the set).  The Baystars set has 44 "Authentic Autograph" cards, four "Star Autograph" cards, nine "Rookie Autograph" cards, seven "Legendary Autograph" cards and three "Combo Autograph" cards.  

- Epoch will be releasing their annual Pacific League Rookies box set on August 30th.  This year's edition will have 40 cards - a 37 card base set, two "special" cards that may be either foil facsimile signature parallel cards or GEM insert cards (both of which would be serially numbered) and one autograph card.  The base set is made up of all of last falls draftees from the six Pacific League teams with the biggest name being Rui Muneyama of the Eagles.  There are three types of autographed cards available of all 37 players and the first round picks also have a "baseball" autograph.

- BBM is releasing the third installment of their set to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Saitama Seibu Lions.  While the two previous parts were 36 card box sets, boxes for the Lions 75th Anniversary Series Vol.3 set will contain 37 cards - a 36 card base set plus one "special insert card" which could be either a facsimile or authentic autograph.  The base set will include 19 OB players from the 1990's and 2000's and 17 current players (each of the players currently on the Lions' roster will eventually be included in one of the four sets).  The set will be out in late July with the final part arriving in September.

- BBM's annual cheerleader/dance squad set called "Dancing Heroine" will be released in late August.  Like last year, this will be released as one set this year instead of the two installments - Hana and Mai - that BBM had done previously.  The set will be around 180 cards.  As usual the set only includes members of the squads from the Giants, Tigers, Swallows, Dragons, Hawks, Fighters, Marines, Eagles and Lions and, as usual, I have no idea why the ones from the Buffaloes and Baystars are not included (the Carp don't have cheerleaders).  There a holo parallel of all the base set cards and an 18 card "Two-shot" insert set.  There are also autographs and "cheki" cards available.  

- BBM's annual high-end set - Genesis - will be released in early October, a little later than normal.  As usual the base set contains 120 cards - ten per team which splits up as nine player cards and a team checklist.  Also as usual, no one really cares about the base set as the attraction of Genesis is the autograph and memorabilia cards available in the boxes.  The different varieties are too numerous to list but there are booklets, super patches, ball autographs and multiplayer autographed memorabilia cards.  There's also a myriad of parallel versions of all the base cards and five "High-grade insert card" sets - Elite Of Nine, Game Changer, Unrivaled, Cross Ocean and Combo Cross Foil Signing.  

- I realized that I missed writing about the new SCC KBO League Collection Card set which was released back in May.  The base set (the "Normal" cards according to SCC) has kind of a unique twist that I don't think SCC (or anyone else for that matter) has done before.  Each of the 140 active players (14 from each team) featured have two cards in the set - one showing them in their home uniform and one showing them in their away uniform.  In addition to the 280 cards for active players, there's also 11 cards of OB players which brings the size of the base set to 291.  There are also 90 "Puzzle" cards available - nine for each team which form a 3x3 puzzle featuring nine players from the team - and 81 "Hologram" cards - 7 from each team plus one for each of the 11 OB players.  There is a parallel version of the "Hologram" cards as well,  There's also 30 "Clover" cards - three from each team.  These appear to be some sort of partially transparent card.  There are 81 autographed cards available which have a similar breakdown as the "Hologram" cards in that most teams have seven of them and there's one for each of the OB players.  The big difference (other than not every active player who has a "Hologram" card has an autographed one and vice versa) is that for some reason there's eight autographs for Kia but only six for Kiwoom.

The title of this post was inspired by a song I heard Chuck Prophet do live a little over a month ago (even though one of the sets came out in the spring and one of them is scheduled for the fall):