More New Releases

Maybe it was because we had a lot going on but I felt like last month lasted a long time.  So I was surprised that it had only been a little more than four weeks since I last did a round up of new set announcements.  I might have put this off a little longer but one of those sets is going to be released very soon so I wanted to make sure I mentioned it ahead of time.

- That set is Calbee's Series Two set which is scheduled to be released in "early August" although it won't be in "major convenience stores" until the 26th.  The set is pretty much the standard Calbee set from the past few years.  The base set has 78 cards - 60 "regular" player cards (five per team), a 12 cards "Opening Day Cleanup Hitters" and six checklist cards featuring cartoon images of team mascots.  There are two insert sets - the usual 24 card "Star" set and a 12 card "Opening Pitcher" set.  The "Opening Pitcher" set used to be the kind of associated set that would be sold a separate set from Calbee's Amazon shop but it looks like they aren't doing that any more.  The set's full checklist can be seen here.

- BBM is releasing the fourth and final installment of their Lions 75th Anniversary set in early September.  Like the Vol.3 (but not like Vol.1 and Vol.2 which were 36 card box sets), Vol.4 will be a 37 card box set that includes a 36 card base set and one "special" card that could be either a foil facsimile autograph card or an actual autograph card.  The base set is split between active players (19 cards) and OB players (17 cards).  I think if you have the base sets for all four boxes, you'd have 142 cards that are split between 69 active players (basically the entire 70 man roster) and 73 OB players.

- BBM's annual-ish multi-sports set Infinity will be released in late October.  As usual, BBM hasn't released much information about the set yet so I can't tell you how big the base set is.  Also as usual, it looks like the bulk of the athletes in the set are active and retired baseball players such as Shinya Miyamoto, Atsunori Inaba,Shinnosuke Abe, Hayato Sakamoto and Munetaka Murakami.  The other athletes in the set are from softball, basketball, rugby, volleyball, table tennis, badminton, track and field, swimming, diving, inline speed skating, field hocky, ice hockey, judo, sumo, boxing, pro wrestling, martial arts, auto racing and mahjong.  All the regular cards will have facsimile signature parallels available.  There will also be plastic insert cards called "Lucent" along with some sort of metallic insert and probably some others but it's not clear what they are.

- Bushiroad is issuing two more booster pack sets for their DreamOrder collectible card game.  The first one - Samurai Japan - is listed as a "Premium Booster" which is reflected in its price - 550 yen for a pack of three cards vs 500 yen a pack.  There's 28 players listed on the website with the biggest names probably being Shugo Maki, Shota Morishita, Sosuke Genda and Hiroto Takahashi.  I'm not sure if this is the roster of a specific Samurai Japan team or not.  If it is, it's probably last fall's Premier 12 squad.  There'll be parallel versions of all the cards available.  This set will be available on September 6th.

- The second booster pack - Heroes of 2025 - will be released on September 27th.  I think there's 60 cards in the set with a confusing bunch of parallels but I could be wrong.  Some of what I think are parallels might just be short printed player cards.  Bushiroad makes a big deal in their web page for this set of it being their first set featuring all 12 teams and also how it features photos taken in 2025.  Since none of the earlier booster pack sets from this year included any players who changed teams over the winter or any rookies (I think), I wonder if this set will include them.