Topps, Team Sets, Game Cards, 2nd Version and a KBO set

Time for another round up of recently announced NPB sets...

- Topps is back for their sixth year of doing NPB sets.  I'm not exactly sure of the details of this year's edition of their flagship set though - TradingCardJournal.com says the set will be released on June 12 but Topps' Japanese website says it'll be May 29th.  Neither listing says how big the set will be but I'm assuming it'll be the usual 216 cards (18 cards per team).  There will be insert cards but it beats the hell out of me what they'll be because Topps didn't bother including that information either - other than they're going to have one that uses the 1991 design.  There'll be the usual myriad of parallels but again there are no details other than they'll exist and some of them will be serially numbered.  There will be autographed cards of active NPB players, "active players currently playing in MLB" which I assume means active former NPB players (I don't expect to see Aaron Judge cards) and retired players (which have been some of Topps' more interesting inclusions).  The big news is that Topps will include relic cards for active players with this set for the first time.

- While I'm on the subject of Topps, I should mention that there are some World Baseball Classic inserts available in the recently released Bowman set but they're pretty rare and expensive.  The 25 card "Anime" insert set features anime-style cartoon images of a number of active and retired players including Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh, Paul Skenes and Bobby Witt, Jr. in their WBC uniforms.  One of the retired players in the set is Sadaharu Oh which is pretty cool and the active MLB players include Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto and Tatsuya Imai.  There's a kanji variation of the "Anime" inserts as well that's only for the Japanese players (Ohtani, Oh, Murakami, Okamoto, Imai along with Hideo Nomo and Shotaro Morii, a farmhand in the Sacramento Athletics organization).  

- BBM has announced the final three of their "comprehensive" team sets for 2026.  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 translate 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.  BBM also introduced a new premium insert called "My Fave" with this year's Giants set so all four of these sets also have those available.  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	Inserts	Other
Early July	Buffaloes	69	Reborn(2), Samurai Soul(2), Heirloom Sword(2), Small But Amazing(2), Natural(4)	Go All Together(9), Beyond The Dream That Must Come True(3), Golden Egg(3), Three Pillars(3), Treasure(24), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(12)	Autograph cards
Mid July	Marines	68	Rising Young Players(4), Veteran Players(2), Specialists(3), Early Season Highlights(4)	Key Players(9), Promising Players(3), Veterans(3), Rookies(3), Treasure(23), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(12)	Autograph & Memorabilia cards
Late July	Dragons	69	Young Starting Pitchers(3), Infield Key Players(3), Tokai Heroes(6)	Unstoppable(9), No Limit(3), Rise Above(3), Shine Bright(3), Treasure(24), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(24)	Autograph & Memorabilia cards

- BBM has also announced that this year's edition of 2nd Version, the second part of their flagship set, will be released in late August.   The base set follows the pattern of almost all 2nd Version sets since 2015 - 216 player cards (18 for each team), 12 team checklists, 36 "1st Version Update" cards (three for each team), 36 "Cross Forest" cards (three for each team, numbered in continuation of the same subset in 1st Version) and a currently unspecified number of "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards.  The "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards are likely short-printed again, so the base set without them will be 300 cards.  There's six different insert sets - "The Beginning", "My Generation (Year Of The Rat)", "Hero's Theme", "Combined", "Treasure" and "Foil Picturesque".  All of these have 12 cards except for "Treasure" which has 36.  There's the usual plethora of parallels of the player cards along with the "Secret", "Ultra Secret", and "Super Ultra Secret" photo variations.  There will also be memorabilia cards and autographed cards - including autographed cards using the designs from BBM's team sets along with "buyback" autographs.

- Epoch has announced another "Premier Edition" team set.  This one is for the Fighters and will hit the stores on July 18th.  The base set will contain 45 cards - 37 for active players and eight for OB players.  There's a "hologram" parallel available for each of the base set cards.  The set has the usual large batch of inserts that all 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.  There are five different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" 37), "Star" (6), "Rookie" (5), "Legendary" (8) and "Combo"6).  

- Bandai is issuing updates to their "Professional Baseball FanStars" collectible card game.  The Vol. 2 Booster Packs for both the Central League and Pacific League will be released on May 30th.  Both sets will have 96 cards - 36 "Normal", 30 "Rare", 18 "Star Rare" and 12 "Super Star Rare".  In addition, Bandai will issue a set called "EX Booster Pack Vol.1" on August 1 but there's not really any more information about it than that.  

- And finally, the first KBO set for 2026 has been announced by SCC.  It's called "Festa Set" and will be released on June 6th.  As is kind of standard for KBO sets, it's a bit confusing but I think the base set is 80 cards (eight per team) with all the base cards being labeled "Sporty".  There are also 80 "Treasure" cards but I'm not sure if these should be considered inserts or parallels or just 80 more base set cards.  There are 49 autographed cards available which works out to five per team except for SSG which one has four.

Yet More Cards From Kenny

Hot on the heels of the last envelope I received from Kenny (Zippy Zappy) in Japan was yet another one.  I got this one last Friday, just three days after the previous one, but I was away all weekend so I didn't have a chance to write about it before now.

Kenny's envelopes usually have only a small number of cards but this one had more than usual.  The main part of the package was this:

"This" is an unopened pack of the Fan Stars Pacific League Vol. 1 set, the new collectible card game set from Bandai.  Now, I am completely incapable of not opening a pack of cards for a set that I don't have all the cards for and since I had no cards from this set, I had to go ahead and open it.  The pack contained seven cards in all - five "normal", one "rare" and one "super rare".  Here's all seven cards with the "normal" ones first, then the "rare" one (it has a "chrome-ish" finish on it) and then the "super rare" one (which will be obvious):

#BBP01-015

#BBP01-035

#BBP01-054

#BBP01-077

#BBP01-098

#BBP01-110

#BBP01-004

The pack also included a promo card for the game:

The back of this card looks like this - I don't know if it's somehow used for game play or not:

There were four other cards in the pack as well.  The first one is another Fan Stars card but this is from the Central League Vol. 1 set:

#BBC01-017

I will continue to mention that the Fan Stars cards may be the most attractive CCG cards I've ever seen for NPB.

The remaining cards were all Topps cards from last year:

2025 Topps NPB #36

2025 Topps NPB #89

2025 Topps NPB #193

Kenny has let me know that there's another envelope that's en route so I'll be doing another one of these posts shortly.  Thanks once again for the cards, Kenny!

More Cards From Kenny

When I emailed Kenny (Zippy Zappy) a few weeks ago to thank him for the cards he'd sent me, he replied with a promise that another envelope would soon be on its way to me.  That envelope arrived today and it contained five collectible card game cards that covered a 21 year time period.

Three of the cards were Konami issues and, as always, I made my best guess as to which of the bewildering number of Konami sets these are from:

2005 Konami Baseball Heroes Old SP #B05S009

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B09S046

2012 Konami Baseball Heroes Vol. 2 #C12RS027

The next card was a Bushiroad DreamOrder card from 2024 of then-Lions and now-Astros pitcher Tatsuya Imai:

2024 Bushiroad Dream Order Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #PBP01-L01

To be fair, there's a bewildering number of separate DreamOrder sets as well.  I just find them a little easier to figure out which set any particular card comes from.

The last card was from the new Bandai Fan Stars set.  Specifically, this card is from the Fan Stars set that was distributed with packs of "Kakinotane" - this is the third consecutive year that Bandai has done a set given away with bags of the bar snack - the first two years were the "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection" cards that featured caricatures of players.

2026 Bandai Fan Stars Kakinotane #BBK01-15

I have to say that I find the Bandai card pretty attractive for a CCG card,  I find most of the card designs way too busy for my tastes.  But this set seems to have kept the game-related stuff on the front of the card from dominating it.

This not only is my first Fan Stars card but it's my first 2026 card!

As aways, thank you for the cards, Kenny!  I need to go back to Japan just so I can buy you a beer or dinner or both for all your generosity!

Team Sets Galore!

I feel like I blink and a month has passed since the last time I did a round up of new set announcements.  There's been a bunch of new announcements since then, most of which are team sets.  One of them is already in stores but most of the rest won't be out until June.

- The set that's already in stores is a 30 card Tigers team set from Bandai.  This set is being sold in packs of two cards that include two vanilla cream wafers so Jambalaya has referred to this as the "Twin Wafers" set.  It looks like there's a 20 card base set featuring various Tigers players along with card for the team's mascots along with a 10 card subset with card numbers that start with "R" (for rare maybe?).  The "R" cards feature additional card of nine players who are in the base set (Teruaki Sato, Koji Chikamoto, Shota Morishita, etc) plus a card of manager Kyuji Fujikawa.  The cards are only available in Kansai.  (I should mention that the first series of Bandai's other NPB cards for 2026 - the collectible card game Fan Stars - came out a few weeks ago and are pretty attractive for CCG cards).

- Speaking of Collectible Card Games (ok, maybe not the smoothest transition), Bushiroad is apparently still pumping out their DreamOrder cards.  There'll be a booster pack set called "Zone Impact" (or possibly "Impact Zone") released on June 6th.  I think there are 180 "regular" player cards - 84 "common", 48 "rare", 36 "super rate" and 12 "zone rare" along with 30 "Tactics" cards - 29 "common" and 1 "rare".  There's also the usual bewildering batch of parallels.

- Epoch has announced that the 2026 edition of their flagship "NPB" set will be out on June 27th.  After the size of the base set shrunk in each of the last two years, it was nice to see that it'll be 240 cards again this year (still way too big of a drop from the 432 cards the set was from 2018 to 2023) which works out to 20 cards per team.  There is a "retail version" of the set as well has an additional 12 "rookie variation" cards listed under the "regular card" section of the add.  There's some other differences between the "standard" and "retail" versions.  While both sets have parallel versions of all 240 base cards, the "standard" version also has two 12 card insert sets - "NPB Stars" and "Walk-Off Win" while the "retail" version only has parallel versions of the 12 "rookie variation" cards.  Both sets have 178 different autographed cards available but the "standard" version also offers 12 of Epoch's ubiquitous "GEM" premium insert cards.  I do not know if the "retail version" is exclusive to FamilyMart as it was two years ago.

- Epoch has announced two more of their 2026 "Premier Edition" team sets.  The Baystars set will be out on June 6th and the Buffaloes will be out a week later on the 13th.  As usual, the sets are very similar except for the size of the base set.  The Baystars set has 49 cards in its base set (including 10 cards for OB players) while the Buffaloes set has just 41 base set cards (although only two of them are OB players so both sets feature 39 active players).  There's a "hologram" parallel available for each of the base set cards.  Both sets have the usual large batch of inserts that all 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.  Both sets have five different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" (40 for DeNA, 39 for Orix), "Star" (5 and 6 respectively), "Rookie" (6 for the Baystars and 10 for the Buffaloes), "Legendary" (10 for DeNA and 2 for Orix) and "Combo"(8 and 4).  

- Lastly, BBM has announced four more of their "comprehensive" team sets for 2026, bringing the total number announced for this year to nine.  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.  BBM also introduced a new premium insert called "My Fave" with this year's Giants set so all four of these sets also have those available.  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	Inserts	Other
Late May	Hawks	65	Inheritance(6), Fight! Kyushu(3), Next Cannon(2), Speed Baller(5)	Easygoing and Self-Reliant(9), Craftsman(3), Young Gun(3), Next Wave(3), Treasure(24), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(18)	Autograph & Memorabilia cards
Mid June	Baystars	68	Veteran Sluggers(3), Leading Candidates(3), Master-Disciple Duo(3), Early Highlights(3)	Main Players(9), No. 1 Draft Picks(3), Veterans(3), Rookies(3), Treasure(23), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(18)	Autograph cards
Mid June	Fighters	69	Re: Evolution(2), Middle Infield(1), Slugging Catcher(3), Hokkaido Association(5), No-hitter(1)	Dominate(9), Three Arrows(3), Next Up(3), Momentum(3), Treasure(24), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(24)	Autograph & Memorabilia cards
Late June	Tigers	68	Promising Young Players(3), Memories Of Jersey Numbers(3), Solid Contribution(3), World Tigers(3)	Glory To Tigers!(9), Mighty Relievers(3), Contenders(3), Gush Out(3), Treasure(24), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(24)	Autograph & Memorabilia cards

I don't know why the Baystars cards don't add up to 81.

The last three teams that BBM hasn't announced yet are the Marines, Dragons and Buffaloes.

2017 Konami Baseball Collection Location Tests

Konami's most recent collectible card game was called Baseball Collection.  Apparently the cards were won by playing an arcade game and were subsequently used in the playing of more games.  Konami produced the cards for five years, from 2018 to 2022.  

Or so I thought.

I was recently made aware through a comment by a reader to an old post that Konami did a number of "test events" for the game in late 2017 and early 2018.  These events apparently featured cards that I'd never seen before - or had even heard about.  The person who commented on the post mentioned that there was a test event in Osaka that he was particularly interested in.

I did a little research to see if I could find out anything about these cards.  I went back to the search page for Baseball Collection on Suruga-ya's website - the same one I had used last year to figure out how Konami numbered their cards.  I plugged "2017" into the search field and was pleasantly surprised to have a list of 134 cards appear.  The cards appeared to be in two groups based on the prefixes of the card numbers.  There were 14 cards with a "201701" prefix and 120 cards with a "201702" prefix.  All of the "01" cards had a release date of September 22, 2017 associated with them along with the text "Baseball Collection Location Test Version Round One Umeda Store Exclusive"*.  All of the "02" cards had a release date of October 1, 2017 and had the text "Baseball Collection Location Test Version".

* To be clear - the text was associated with the listing of the cards at Suruga-ya - not on the cards themselves

Umeda, of course, is in Osaka so my first thought was that this was the event that the commenter was referencing.

According to the card lists, it looked like there was one card per team for the "201701" cards plus two extra cards of Shohei Ohtani (there's a total of three Ohtani cards in this group of cards - one of which is at the top of this post) and ten cards per team for the "201702" cards (and no Ohtani cards).

So we've established that there were definitely 2017 Baseball Collection cards.  But I wondered what else I could find out about the test events.  Well, to be completely accurate, I wondered what Kenny and Ryan could find out about the test events as both of them are ,uch better at finding out stuff about gaming cards that I am.  

Kenny found a long video showing someone playing the game in early 2018 and a brief mention of the game in a preview of new games from early February, 2018.  Ryan found someone selling another Ohtani card from the "201701" cards (the extremely low price of which makes me think it's an old listing).

Both of them independently of each other found a very useful site that contains a great deal of information about the test events for the game.  That site confirmed that the initial test event began on September 22, 2017 at the Round One Umeda store*.  This was followed by another event in mid-October at an unrecorded location in Aichi (I don't think it was a secret test or anything, I'm guessing the author of the page simply didn't know where it was).

* Round One is a chain of "Sports Entertainment" stores in Japan (and apparently also the US)

The next event wouldn't be until mid-January of 2018 at the Silk Hat Kawasaki Dice store (Silk Hat being a chain of arcades) which was followed by an event in mid-to-late February as "Sports Wave Iron Arm 24 Hamano Store Comtec Tower" which I think is in Chiba (not positive but I think Sports Wave is part of the Yamazakiya arcade chain).  The next event was in early March in Hiroshima at the Amipara arcade (Amipara being another arcade chain).  Later in March, there were two events at Round One locations in Yokohama and Fukuoka.  The final events (or at least the final ones listed) were at the end of April and beginning of May at both the Silk Hat Kawasaki Dice store and the Giga Zone Hiroshima Station store (which apparently closed at the end of August, 2021).

The site also gives the pricing information.  It cost 300 yen for one credit which allowed you to play one game and get one card.  The cards apparently were actually printed by the game machine (as opposed to simply dispensed).  It was possible to buy multiple credits/cards at one time but there was no discount.  Two credits were 600 yen, three were 900 yen and four were 1200 yen.  Five was, as you'd expect, 1500 yen but you would be guaranteed that one of your five cards was a "Rare" (or better) card.  The next listed increment is nine - I don't know if that meant you couldn't buy six, seven or eight credits in one go or not.  The nine cards (2700 yen) would be include two "Rare" (or better) cards.

I was initially thinking that the listing at Suruga-ya of the 2017 cards might be comprehensive, even though there were only 14 of the "201701" cards, but doing a search of "ベースボールコレクションロケテスト" ("Baseball Card Location Test") on Mercari disabused me of that notion.  To be fair, it may have a complete listing of the "201702" cards but the Mercari search came up with additional "201701" cards.  What should have tipped me off that that wasn't a complete listing of the "201701" cards is that 12 of the 14 were marked as "UR" or "Ultra Rare" while there was only one "Rare" card and one "Normal" card.  I want to show a couple sample "201701" cards although the only "UR" card I've seen is the Ohtani card at the top of this post.  That image was swiped from Suruga-ya but you can also see the card at this post on Mercari - in case you feel like spending 355,050 yen ($2432).  Here's a couple "R" ("Rare") cards:

And a couple "N" ("Normal") cards:

Here's what the backs of the cards look like.  The backs are the same regardless of whether the card in "UR", "R" or "N":

Something interesting to note about the backs - the card numbering is a little different than it would be in later years as the player's uniform number has not been incorporated into the number.  There's also a two letter designation of "NM" for the "Normal" cards rather than the single letter used from 2018 on.  (The "Rare" designator also changed from "RA" to "R".)  So, for example, while this card of Sugano has a number of "201701-NM-G003-00", later cards of Sugano would have numbers like "201810-N-G019-00".

Konami changed the card design completely between the "201701" cards and the "201702" cards.  The "201702" cards look very similar to the 2018 cards.  Konami also changed the designation of the rarest cards from "UR" ("Ultra Rate") to "SR" ("Super Rare").  Here are example cards of each type - "N", "R" and "SR" (all three images were swiped from Suruga-ya):

The card backs again were the same regardless of whether the card was "SR", "R" or "N":

In paleontology, we'd refer to this card back as a "transitional fossil" as it exhibits traits of its predecessor (the card number not including the player's uniform number) as well as its successors (the rest of the card back looks pretty much the same as the card backs for the 2018-22 cards).

Because there's a three month gap between the initial test events in September/October of 2017 and the later test events in January-May of 2018, I'm going to guess that the "201701" cards were used in the 2017 events and the "201702" cards were used in the 2018 events.  The author of the web page that both Kenny and Ryan pointed me at attended a couple of the events in Kanto in January, February and April and all the cards in the photos on the site appear to be the "201702" cards.

As you might expect with the "2017" test events lasting until May of 2018, the "official" 2018 Baseball Collection cards were not released until September 25th, nearly the end of the baseball season.  Curiously, the first digraph on the 2018 card numbers (the two digits following the year in the first group of numbers) was "10" while it was "00" in subsequent years.  The remaining four sets were released near the beginning of the baseball season - late March of each year except 2020 when COVID delayed the start of the season until June.

Thanks again to Kenny and Ryan (as well as the unknown author of that website) for doing the research for me on this.

Spring Is Coming...Isn't It?

My part of the world got dumped on with a bunch of snow and ice on Sunday and the temperatures have dropped into the Arctic range so I want to focus on some recent announcements for card sets that will be coming out when the weather will hopefully be a bit warmer.

- I had made a prediction in my wrap up of Epoch's 2025 card sets that last year's edition of the Holographica set, one of their annual collaborations with the OB Club, was going to be delayed until March of 2026.  I was correct - the set will be released on March 14th.  This is another of Epoch's "ultra high end sets" with each six card box retailing for 16,500 yen (about $107).   Each box is guaranteed to include two autographed cards.  I don't think the full checklist has been settled on yet but there are at least 59 cards in the base set, each with a parallel version, and something like four different varieties of autographed cards.  Players in the set include Sadaharu Oh, Ichiro, Koji Uehara, Koji Yamamoto and Tsutomu Wakamatsu.

- BBM is issuing a box set dedicated to Munetaka Murakami called "Kiseki".  Each box will contain 37 cards which will include the 36 card base set plus one "special" insert card which could be a parallel card, one of ten different memorabilia cards or one of five different autographed cards.  The set will be out in mid-March.

- Jumping ahead a few months, BBM is releasing the 2026 edition of their 1st Version set in early May.  The details for the set look pretty much the same as it's been for every year since 2015.  There's the usual 324 player/manager cards (27 for each team), the 12 team checklist cards and the 36 "Cross Something" cards that will be continued in the 2nd Version set later in the year - this year the Something is "Forest".  That makes a total of 372 cards in the base set.  Nine cards for each team have several different facsimile autograph parallels.  There are also parallel versions for 71 of the rookie cards (or all the rookie cards).  There are three varieties of short printed photo variants - each team has a card with a rare "secret" version, a card with a rarer "ultra secret" version and a card with an even rarer "super ultra secret" version (and they could all possibly be variants for the same player).  There are two non-premium insert sets - "New Wonder" (12 cards - one rookie per team) and "Japonism" (12 cards - one per team) - and four serially numbered premium insert sets - "Amazing" (12 /50 cards - one per team), "Promising" (12 /50 cards - one per team) "Cross Foil Signing" (6 cards - all members of the Giants) and "3D Cross Forest" (12 cards - one per team as you probably guessed).  Some of the insert sets will probably have parallel versions but I don't see anything about them yet.  There are both autograph and memorabilia cards available, including cards with multiple autographs and cards with memorabilia from multiple players.  There will also be "buyback" autographs available.

- Bandai is returning to the NPB Collectible Card Game market for the first time since their final Owners League set back in 2015.  The new game is called "Professional Baseball Fan Stars" and appears to be a mobile game.   Bandai will be releasing two sets of cards in late March - a Central League Vol.1 set and a Pacific League Vol.1 set - in boxes containing ten packs containing seven cards each.  Both sets will have 120 cards - 48 "Normal", 36 "Rare", 24 "Star Rare" and 12 "Super Star Rare" (which will break down to 4 "Normal", 3 "Rare", 2 "Star Rare" and 1 "Super Star Rare" for each team).  I'm assuming there will be additional "volumes" released as the year goes on.  I don't know if this means that Bushiroad will not be continuing the "DreamOrder" cards but I kind of think it does - there are no new releases mentioned on their website.

- Bandai, of course, collaborated with Namco the past two years to produce the very fun "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection" sets which were distributed with bags of kaki no tane, a snack food.  The two are teaming up again this year to release more of the Collectible Card Game "Fan Stars" cards.  There will be 36 cards in the set - 12 "Normal", 12 "Rare" and 12 "Star Rare".  There are parallel versions of the "Star Rare" cards available.  The set will be released in April.

Kenny Strikes Again

It wasn't even a day after I posted about getting a surprise envelope in the mail from Kenny - perhaps better known as Zippy Zappy - when I received a second envelope in the mail from him.  This one had ten cards in it, all from 2025 sets.

The first three cards were from the 2025 Topps NPB set:

2025 Topps NPB #68

2025 Topps NPB #186

2025 Topps NPB #211

It's interesting that Topps decided to use black ink on the names on the first and last of these three cards.  They're not too difficult to read in person but, man, the scans are practically unreadable.  The Marines player is Kyota Fujiwara and the Giants player is Taisei Ota who just goes by "Taisei".

The next batch of cards were from the 2025 Topps Stadium Club NPB.  I think Stadium Club is probably the best NPB set that Topps does (ok, it's a small sample size of two) so I was very happy to get these cards:

2025 Topps Stadium Club NPB #126

2025 Topps Stadium Club NPB #25

2025 Topps Stadium Club NPB #73

2025 Topps Stadium Club NPB #35

2025 Topps Stadium Club NPB #97

2025 Topps Stadium Club NPB #45

I saved the best for last.  In September, Bushiroad had put out a Samurai Japan set under their collectible card game line "DreamOrder".  As far as I can tell, it's for the 2024 Premier 12 edition of the team and appears to have cards of all 28 players from the squad.  Kenny sent me the Hiroto Takahashi card from this set:

2025 Bushiroad DreamOrder Samurai Japan #PB01-SJ01

As Kenny mentioned when he shared this card on his blog, the foil on this card makes it difficult to scan (I'm paraphrasing a bit).  But it looks pretty nice in person.

I thought I'd share a gif that sums up my feelings about the cards:

Thanks again for the cards, Kenny!

First Zippy Zappy-ing Of The New Year

Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy - had given me a heads up a few weeks back that there was a new envelope on its way across the Pacific to me and it showed up at my house today.  It contained two cards, neither of which I already had.  Kenny's always had a pretty good knack for sending me cards that I don't already own which is pretty impressive considering I have a LOT of Japanese cards.  In fairness, however, it's gotten a little easier over the last year since I stopped buying new cards.

Case in point this first card of Koki Kitayama from the Calbee "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" set that was just released about a month ago:

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-20

It was a little more of a gamble that I didn't have this Bushiroad DreamOrder card of Orlando Calixte from 2024.  But I didn't.

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Central League Booster Pack Vol. 4 #CBP04-D05

Thanks again for the cards, Kenny!

2025 In Review - Everything Else (Including Korea)

I'm finishing up my review of 2025's card releases in Japan (and Korea) with everything that wasn't done by BBM, Epoch, Calbee or Topps.

Bushiroad returned this past year with updates to their DreamOrder collectible card game that was initially released in 2024.  They released a booster pack set for each of the 12 NPB teams which were released in pairs throughout the year with the Giants and Tigers sets coming out in March; the Buffaloes, Lions, Carp and Dragons getting released in April; the Hawks, Eagles, Baystars, and Swallows hitting stores in May and the Fighters and Marines getting published in June.  They also released two other sets in September - a Samurai Japan set that appears to be team set for the 2024 Premier 12 team (which furthers my confusion about the Samurai Japan license holder) and a "Heroes Of 2025" set that features some of the top players from each team.

Bandai returned with a second edition of their "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection", their collaboration with Namco that was distributed with packets a snack called "kaki no tane".  Like their 2024 set, this was a 36 card set featuring caricatures of players.

Epoch and the Eagles collaborated on a "comprehensive" team set for the second year in a row.  I was a bit surprised when I realized that there was only one of these sets released in 2025 since the Eagles have done two - labeled "1st Version" and "2nd Version" - almost every year since at least 2018.  As far as I could tell, this was the only collaboration between a team and card company this year - the Lions and BBM did not issue an "L Collection" set for the first time in several years.  I am sure that, once again, various teams issued card sets either through their fan clubs or with meals at the ballpark (or both) but I don't know anything about them.

TIC (or "Hits" or "Produce 216") only did a single one of their "mini colored paper" or "mini shikishi" team sets this year and it was for the Hawks.  They did, however, issue a new product called "mini folding screens".  Each "mini folding screen" is a panel about 24 centimeters (9 1/2 inches) by 13.5 centimeters (around 5 1/3 inches) which is split into three parts.  They issued three sets of eight sheets (four "base set" sheets with four "foil signature" parallels) for three teams - the Giants, Hawks and Dragons.

I think my total count of 2025 NPB sets comes out to about 77 which is a little lower than last year's total of 79 (I had listed the total number of 2024 sets as 60 in my review last year but I was counting all the DreamOrder cards as being one set rather than twenty individual sets).  This would be a count of all the "nationally" released sets (so I'm including the Epoch/Eagles team set but no other team issued sets) but not any of the on-line, on-demand Epoch One or Topps Now cards.

There were three KBO sets released in South Korea in 2025 - all by SCC.  KBO Collection was released in May, KBO Collection+ came out in August and KBO Sensation was released in September.

Another Zippy Zappy-ing

Earlier this week, I finally got around to writing about some cards that Kenny (Zippy Zappy) had sent me a month or so ago.  He left a comment on that post, saying there was another envelope en route to me.  It showed up yesterday and contained this "Super Rare" card from the 2021 Konami Baseball Collection set:

#2021C7-SRD001-00

Thanks as always, Kenny!

A Brief History Of NPB Collectible Card Games - Part 3 - Future Bee, Bandai and Bushiroad

I'm finally getting around to finishing off this series of posts.  I devoted earlier posts to Takara and Konami.  This one deals with the other three "modern" game - Power League from Future Bee (or CollecCarA), Owners League from Bandai and DreamOrder from Bushiroad.

Future Bee 2000-2001

A company called "Collection Card Assortment" or "CollecCarA" issued cards under the "Future Bee" label from 1998 to 2001.  Their cards were team sets for the Baystars, Swallows and Marines but they also did a collectible card game set called "Power League" in 2000 and 2001 that included all twelve teams.  There were two sets in 2000 - "Dream Stadium" which had a 252 card base set and "UL 2000" which only had 195 cards (including three checklists which is why it's not evenly divisible by 12).  Both sets had "Super Rare" inserts and the "UL 2000" set also had an insert set for the statistical leaders and award winners for the 2000 season.  I only have base set and "Super Rare" cards from the Dream Stadium set:

2000 Power League Dream Stadium #220

2000 Power League Dream Stadium Super Rare #S006

Their single set in 2001 was again called "Dream Stadium" and again had 252 player cards but they added two unnumbered checklists so that the total number of cards in the base set was 254.  Unlike the 2000 version, it was issued in two series. It had three insert sets - half of each insert set was released in each series - "Nostalgic" (featuring OB players including Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima), "Current Player" and "Best Performers".  These are the only two cards I have from this set:

2001 Power League Dream Stadium #072

2001 Power League Dream Stadium Current Player #S-59

I don't know how the game was played but there was player information on both sides of the card so I don't think it involved hiding which players you were using from your opponent.

Bandai 2010-2015

Bandai's CCG cards were issued under the name "Owners League".  Compared to Konami, Bandai's releases were fairly straight-forward.  For the most part, there were four releases each year - Owners League 01, Owners League 02, Owners League 03 and Owners League 04.  Each year's sets shared the same design but were numbered separately so they shouldn't be considered separate "series" the way that Topps' or Calbee's releases are.

While the number of Owners League sets were less confusing than Konami's, the content of those sets was kind of bewildering.  The base set for each set contained five or six different types of cards, from the common "Normal (B)" and "Normal (W)" cards (with the "B" and "W" standing for "Black" and "White" respectively) to the short-printed cards labelled variously "Star", "New Star", "Superstar", "Infinity", "Clutch", "Boost" and "Great".  Some of the sets also had related insert sets of "Idol" (mascots) and "Legend" (OB players).  

I've never tried to complete one of the sets but I imagine the large number of short prints would make it difficult.  For example, the 2011 Owners League 04 set (which I bought a box of a while back) had a base set of 132 cards but 48 of those were short-prints - 12 "Great" cards, 12 "Super Star" cards and 24 "Star" cards.  

Here's an example base card from each year the sets were issued:

2010 Bandai Owners League 04 #088

2011 Bandai Owners League 02 #022

2012 Bandai Owners League 03 #102

2013 Bandai Owners League 04 #070

2014 Bandai Owners League 04 #053

2015 Bandai Owners League 01 #009 (Shohei Ohtani)

The cards were used in some sort of online baseball game.  The card backs have a unique code that could be entered at the game's website and used somehow. 

It was kind of interesting (and infuriating) how they identified the set that a card was from on its back.  Before the card number, they'd list "OL##" where "##" was the number of the set.  But they didn't restart this count each year - the number was from 2010.  What I mean by this is that all the cards in the 2011 Owners League 01 set had "OL05" on the back, while all of that year's Owners League 02 set had "OL06".  They continued this all the way through to Owners League 04 in 2015 which was "OL24".  This forced you to do some modulo arithmetic to determine which set the card was actually from.

2015 Bandai Owners League 04 #084 (Seiya Suzuki)

Bandai added a fifth set in 2014 called "Owners League Masters".  Actually to be completely honest, I suspect that this set was first added in 2012 as the card numbers of the 2014 cards (which are the only ones I've seen) have a prefix of "OLM03" which implies that they were the third "Masters" set.

This set was entirely made up of OB players but there was a twist - all the players featured in the set were on the coaching staff for one of the twelve NPB teams that year - although the cards showed them as active players and they may not have played for the teams they were coaching for.

2014 Bandai Owners League Masters #056 (Yutaka Nakamura)

I think these are my favorites of all the post-Takara CCG sets.  I especially like the "04" sets from each year as they have cards of players who either signed late in the season or were traded and did not appear in any other card sets that year.  My favorite example of this is from the afore-mentioned 2011 Owners League 04 set.  Long time Chiba Lotte Marines player Saburo Ohmura (whose registered name with Lotte was just "Saburo") was traded to the Yomiuri Giants at the end of June that year.  The trade was after the cut off for BBM's 2nd Version set and BBM had not started doing the Fusion set, so there would not be any BBM cards of him with the Giants that year.  Similarly, he didn't appear in Calbee's Series Three set.  He returned to Lotte as a free agent in the off season so his 2012 cards all show him with the Marines.  The only contemporary card of him as a Giant that I am aware of is from the 2011 Owners League 04 set (Fun fact - his registered name with the Giants was his full name which is reflected on this card):

2011 Bandai Owners League 04 #093

Bushiroad 2024-

Ryan had pointed out to me at some point that the card market in Japan has historically treated the game cards separately from the "regular" baseball cards (i.e. Calbee, BBM, Epoch, etc).  As a result, most of the baseball card shops in Japan don't tend to stock the game cards very much, at least in the post-Takara era.  I think I've seen more Takara cards in card shops than I've seen Konami, Power League or Bandai cards - off hand the only place I remember getting any Konami cards was Mint Odawara where I got a handful of 2018 Baseball Collection cards.  This dichotomy has contributed to my ignorance about these sets - since Jambalaya doesn't stock them, I haven't been seeing them.

Bushiroad, however, appears to be pushing a different strategy.  They debuted their collectible card game cards, DreamOrder, last year with a big marketing campaign that included getting Mint on board with them.  I saw their cards (and their advertising) in several Mint stores and, most importantly for my ability to track them, Jambalaya has been listing their sets as well.

There's been about 34 distinct DreamOrder sets so far.  They started out last year with a "Starter Deck" set for each of the 12 teams.  These sets included three copies each of 12 unique player cards along with some game play cards.  They then issued four separate "Booster Pack" sets for each league - Vol. 1 came out in April with the "Starter Deck" sets and the remaining sets came out in two month increments - Vol. 2 in June, Vol. 3 in August and Vol. 4 in October.  They've issued a "Booster Pack" for each of the 12 teams this year which have included OB players as well as active ones.  They've also issued a Samurai Japan set and a "Heroes Of 2025" set.

DreamOrder is a table top card game rather than an on-line game, the first such game for NPB since the Konami Field Of 9 cards in 2005.  The card backs are all identical so I assume the players hide what they have available until the cards are played.

I don't have a lot of these cards and the ones that I have are either "regular" player cards or "Tactic" cards.  The "Tactic" cards don't identify the players on them but I've felt that they've featured more interesting photos than the "regular" cards.  Some of the "regular" player cards have "holo" or "kira" finishes or gold text indicating that they're more rare and powerful cards but I don't think these are parallels.  There ARE parallels available in the team "Booster Packs" from this year but I think the cards use a different design rather than the foil/holo stuff.

Here's some examples:

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Dragons Starter Deck #CSD06-D03 (Raidel Martinez)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Lions Starter Deck #PSD05-L01 (Sosuke Genda)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Central League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #CBP01-DB10 (Keita Sano)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #PBP01-E12 (Hiroaki Shimauchi) 

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 #PDO-01 

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 #PDO-06 (Takeya Nakamura)

The last two cards are "Tactics" cards.  There's nothing on the cards that identify the players on the cards and I don't know who the Fighters pitcher is.