Calbee And More Team Sets

It's only been two weeks since the last time I did a round up of new set announcements but I figured that it'd be a good time to do another one.  Maybe writing this post will make me feel better about South Korea getting eliminated by the Dominican Republic...

- Calbee's Series One set will officially be released on April 27th but it'll likely start appearing in card shops both in person and on line a few days before that.  The checklist for the set is online already and it unfortunately confirms that Calbee's continuing to produce sets that are smaller than they were just a few years ago.  There are 89 cards in the base set, split between 60 "regular" player cards (five per team), 23 "Title Holder" cards and six checklist cards.  The theme of the checklist cards is mascots which is distressing for two reasons - in previous years the checklist cards featured some of the best photography in Calbee's sets and Calbee did mascots as the theme of their checklist cards last year too.  The fact that there's six checklist cards implies that there will again be only two Calbee "flagship" sets this year with Series Two coming out sometime in the summer - Calbee's intent every year is to include twelve checklist cards across all of their Series - one checklist card featuring each NPB team (although not a list of the cards for that particular team).  There are the usual 24 "Star" insert cards as well as four "Legend" cards featuring players who retired last year - Yuito Mori, Sho Nakata, Hisayoshi Chono and Shingo Kawabata.  There are gold facsimile signature parallels of both the "Star" and "Legend" cards.  There are also 12 "Team Home Run King" cards listed but I'm not sure if these will be available in packs or as some sort of "special box".  Calbee used to have 12 card box sets that were associated with each Series and sold through some on line retailer (most recently Amazon.co.jp) but the equivalent cards from last year's sets were available in packs. 

- BBM has announced two more of their "comprehensive" team sets.  As usual, each set has a base set of 81 cards, most of which are "regular" player cards featuring the manager and the players on the 70 man roster plus a couple subsets (which may not be fully defined yet) to fill out the set.  Each set also has 18 non-premium insert cards split into a variety of sets which also may not be fully defined yet (or may have title that doesn't translated to something that makes any sense).  The sets also have two or three types of premium inserts that are serially numbered - Treasure, Esperanza and Admirar.  There will be rare parallel versions of some of the "regular" player cards that will feature photo variants or different backgrounds.

Release Date	Team	Regular Cards	Subsets	Non-Premium Inserts	Treasure	Esperanza	Admirar	Other
Late May	Carp	63	2025 Topics(4),  Promising New Forces(4), Born In Setouchi(5)	Paramount(9), Tough Enough(3), Carp Nova(3), Promising Future(3)	20	9	6	Autograph cards
Late May	Giants	63	Mascot Gathering(1), Promising Young Players(5), Strongest Unit(2), Three Arrows(3), Grand Slam Trio(3), Reliable Veterans(4)	Giants Pride 2026(15), Rookies(3)	24	9	6	Additional Premium Insets of Cross Foil Signing (15), Combo Cross Foil Signing (2), Triple Cross Foil Signing (1), Triplex 2026 (3), My Fave (12), Super Metallic Giants (9) plus memorabilia cards

Remember that the Giants don't allow their players to have authentic autographed cards.

- Epoch announced the second of their 2026 "Premier Edition" team sets - this one is for the Swallows.  The base set will 40 cards - 38 cards for active players (and manager Takahiro Ikeyama) plus OB cards for Norichika Aoki and Shingo Kawabata.  There's a "hologram" parallel available for each of the base set cards.  The set has the usual large batch of inserts that the "Premier Edition" sets have- 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 think all the inserts are serially numbered.  There are also the "GEM" and "BLACK GEM" "special insert cards" (nine cards in each) that I think are much more limited.  Finally, there are five different types of autographed cards that are available - "Authentic" (37 different), "Star" (6), "Rookie" (7), "Legendary" (2) and some undetermined as yet number of "Combo" autographs.  The set will hit the shelves on April 25th.