More 2026 Releases

There's been a couple new set announcement recently, with one of the sets actually being scheduled for release next week, so I figured it was time to do a quick round up of them.

- Calbee is releasing yet another "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" set next week on January 27th.  "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" is a mobile game and this will be the third set that Calbee's done as a tie-in.  This looks like it's a follow-on to the set Calbee released at the beginning of December as the card numbers in the new set are starting where that set ended (and now that I look more carefully at the card from that set that Kenny sent me, I see it says "Series 1" on it).  This new set will have 49 cards - 24 "2025 Prospi Selection", 24 "2025 Anniversary Players" and one "secret" card.  I think the "2025 Prospi Selection" cards (which I assume is something from the game) have kira parallels available while the "2025 Anniversary Players" cards have kira and/or facsimile signature parallels.  Not counting the "secret" card, there are four cards per team.  There's some big names in the set including Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Hayato Sakamoto and Teruaki Sato.  It somewhat surprisingly includes Munetaka Murakami who I would have thought couldn't be a on an NPB card set for active players but clearly the licensing details aren't what I thought they were.  The checklist is kind of surprisingly heavy on foreign players with ten total including Raidel Martinez and Livan Moinelo.  What's a bit odd is at least three of those foreign players are, like Murakami, no longer the property of the teams they are listed with.  Tayron Guerrero is no longer a Chiba Lotte Marine and Tyler Austin and Trevor Bauer are no longer Yokokama DeNA Baystars.  I believe that this is the first time Bauer has appeared on a card in any of the major Japanese card manufacturers and I suspect it will be the last, at least as an active player.

- The Eagles annual team issued set has been issued by Epoch the past few years and I'm starting to wonder if it should still be considered a "team issued" set.  When the 2025 edition of this set was announced, I assumed it was the 1st Version set with a 2nd Version set to be released later in the year.  That turned out to not be the case so I won't make that mistake with this year's edition which will be released on February 11th.  The base set will contain 77 cards of active players, including development players.  I believe that the 2025 draft picks/2026 rookie class are included.  There are silver and gold facsimile signature parallels of each of these cards.  There are three insert sets - "Key Performances", "Mound Star" and "My Routine" and autographed cards of all the players with the exception of any development players who were not 2025 draft picks (if that makes sense).  There are also Rui Muneyama uniform cards along with the somewhat ubiquitous "GEM" premium insert cards in both "White" and "Black" varieties. 

- TIC (aka "Hits" or "Produce 216") is issuing their first "mini colored paper" or "mini shikishi" team set since their Hawks set last year and, not surprisingly, it's again for the Hawks.  Once again, there's 32 oversized cards available - 16 "normal" and 16 "special with foil autograph".  There's 16 players listed so everyone has a "normal" and a "special" card.  There are real autographs available as well.  This year's edition will be released on March 28th.

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.

Baystars Fan Club Cards

I frequently mention that the biggest unknown area of Japanese baseball cards are the team issued/fan club cards.  Case in point - Ryan threw a bunch of such cards for the Baystars in the box he sent me back in July - 62 in all, dating from between 2016 and 2019.  Now I had a lot of Baystars team issued cards from this time period already so imagine my surprise that not only did I not have any of these cards, I only had one card that appeared to even be from one of the sets these cards were from!  It was even more surprising because, as far as I could tell, the cards appeared to be from 22 different sets!

It's hard sometimes to tell which set the cards just from the front of it so I figure the best way to do this post is to show the front and back of one card from each set.  I will point out that the majority of these cards have a "kira" finish on the front which doesn't always show up will in the scans.

I need to also point out that whoever Ryan got these cards from was apparently a big fan of pitcher Kenta Ishida as he's on 13 of the cards.  

Keep in mind that the names I'm giving the sets should in no way be considered the "official" name of these sets.  On the advice of a card collector on Reddit, I did some poking around the news archive on the Baystars' website to see if I could find anything about any of the sets.  I specifically was looking at the 2017 archive and while I did find some stuff about cards, they didn't seem to be talking about any of the cards I had.  So these names are simply ones I've given the sets to differentiate them from each other.

We'll do this year by year.  Ryan sent me five cards from 2016 that appear to be from four different sets.  I'm calling this first one the "Fan Club" set:

I'm calling this next one "Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Star Night":

This last one is "Fan Club Climax":

Almost half of the cards I got were from 2017 - 29 cards representing what I think is nine sets.  I again am calling the first one the "Fan Club" set.  This is the only one of all of these sets that I already had a card from:

"Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Kira Gold":

"This Is My Era" (it's not just pitchers so I assume they didn't mean "ERA"):

"I * Yokohama Day":

"Victory Festival 2017":

"Fan Club Star Night":

"Fan Club App Card Collection"  The lines of text on the back of the card says that Ishida came in 13th in the fan vote of the App Card Collection with 668 votes:

"Highlights" I find these the most interesting as they feature events from the season.  I don't know if these were released the same way that teams like the Giants issued "Winning Game Cards" or if they were released after the season.   I do know that there can be multiple cards for the same game.  All of the cards I have between this set and the similar sets from 2018 and 2019 feature Baystars wins at home:

Moving onto 2018, there were 17 cards from five sets.  This first set is "2018 Spring Camp":

"Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Kira Silver":

"Get The Flag!"  I think this was tied into the 20th Anniversary of the Baystars' 1998 Championship.  Besides the explicit mention of "'98" on the back of the card, Tanaka is wearing a throwback uniform:

"Highlights":

Finally for 2019, there were 11 cards in just four sets.  The first one is "2019 Spring Camp":

You could switch the names of the next two sets and they'd still fit.  Here's "Fan Club Kira":

And for lack of a better name, "Fan Club Kira Signature":

And, to wrap things up, "Highlights":

Whew!  That was a lot of cards and sets.  I don't think this is a comprehensive list of the sets for any of these four years and I have no idea what the total number of cards and sets the Baystars issued during this time period (or any other years for that matter).  I also don't know if other teams also have the bewildering number of fan club/team-issued sets.  I know there's a couple years that I have cards from multiple Lions sets but that's still on the order of three or four at most, not nine.

Hawks Team Cards

The box I got from Ryan a few weeks back included four Hawks team issued cards.  Three of these I had expect.  Ryan had given me a couple 2023 Hawks cards of Carter Stewart last year, one of which looked like an action figure still in the packaging.  I had found three similar cards on Mercari and asked Ryan to grab them for me:

All three of these cards were from the 2023 Hawks Season Vol. 3 set.

The other card was another Carter Stewart card.  It was apparently issued during Spring Training in 2024.  Here's the front and back of it:

The QR code is a link to a webpage about the Hawks' Spring Camp which I think they update each year as it's currently about this year's (2025) camp but presumably was about the 2024 camp when the card was released.

Swallows OB Cards

I've mentioned before that there's usually some surprises in the boxes that Ryan sends me and this latest one was no exception.  I found these three foil envelopes in the box:

I'd never seen these before.  Obviously, they were some sort of team issued cards by the Swallows in celebration of the 55th Anniversary of their acquisition by Yakult but I had no idea beyond that.  I opened the first pack and discovered that it only had one card in it:

There's no name on the front of the card but I was pretty sure I knew who it was - Hall Of Famer Atsuya Furuta.  The back of the card confirmed it:

The other two packs contained cards of Yoshinori Satoh and Junji Ogawa:

The QR code on the back of the cards is still valid and brings up a webpage with details about how the team celebrated the anniversary last year.  It turns out the cards were giveaways on days that the player pictured participated in a first pitch ceremony before the game.  Furuta's card was given away on July 16th (along with Kenjiro Kawasaki and Tetsuya Iida), Satoh's card was given away on September 19th and Ogawa's card was given away on September 21st (along with Tsutomu Wakamatsu).  It looks like there were 15 cards in all.  I think each player's blurb on the website is the same as the text on the back of their card.

While this is a rare team issued set where I know how the cards were distributed and how many there are, I am disappointed with one thing I learned from the website - there was a display of historic Yakult uniforms at the JR Shinanomachi station when I was in Japan last year.  Ryan and I actually caught trains at this station after the Swallows game we went to but we didn't know about the jersey display.