Summer To Fall Releases

I wanted to do a quick post on recent set announcements.  There haven't been a lot and I'm a little worried that I haven't heard about when Calbee's Series Two will be released.  Last year it came out in August but I've yet to see anything about it this year.

- I should mention that the Topps Finest set that was released in the US earlier this month included a 35 card "World's Finest" insert set that features players from this year's World Baseball Classic.  The set includes four players from Samurai Japan - Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami and Seiya Suzuki - along with one player from Korea - Lee Jung-hoo.  It's a bit disappointing that there aren't any players from either team who aren't on MLB rosters.  I took a quick look on Ebay to look at what the cards are selling for and the base versions aren't outrageously expensive.  The parallels are another matter, of course.

- Epoch has announced two more of their "Premier Edition" team sets.  The Lions set will be released on August 8th while the Tigers set will be out on the 22nd of that month.  The base set for the Lions will have 40 cards (39 for active players and one for an OB player - Orestes Destrade) while that of the Tigers will have 45 cards (40 for active players and five for OB players).  All the base cards in both sets will have a "hologram" parallel available.  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).  The Lions set has an additional three card insert set dedicated to Takumi Kuriyama.  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.  The Lions set has seven different kinds of autographed cards available - "Authentic" (39 cards), "Star" (6), "Rookie" (6), "Legendary" (1 - I assume it's Destrade), "Takumi Kuriyama" (3 - I think these are autographed version of the insert cards), "Rookie Combo" (1) and "Combo" (3).  The Tigers set only has five different kinds of autographed cards available - "Authentic" (38), "Star" (7), "Rookie" (5), "Legendary" (5) and "Combo" (3).  I have no idea who the two active players that are in the base set but didn't sign "Authentic" autographs.  This brings the count of teams that Epoch has done "Premier Edition" sets for to eight.  The only teams they're missing are the Marines, Hawks, Eagles and Giants.

- Speaking of the Giants, Epoch has announced the first of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets for this year and it's for them.  The set has the somewhat unwieldy name of Giants Stars & Legends with Memorabilia and three card boxes of it will retail for 16,500 yen (roughly $100).  The base set will contain at least 55 cards - 22 active players and at least 33 OB players.  There are three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with nine "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  There's also a six card "Unbreakable Spirit" insert set.  The memorabilia cards referred to by the set title are bat cards for eight active players and batting glove cards (and a batting glove and bat combo card) for one player (Yuta Izuguchi).  The set also includes several different types of autographed cards.  All the autographed cards are for OB players because the Giants do not allow authentic autographed cards for any of their active players.  The set will be in stores on October 3rd.

- BBM issues a multi-sport set each fall since 2016.  This set is usually called "Infinity" except in years that end in either "6" or "1".  Since this year is 2026, the set is not "Infinity" but "Masterpiece" instead.  The funky naming pattern is because BBM celebrates the founding of their parent company - BBM Magazine Sha - in 1946 so this year is their 80th Anniversity (with 2021 having been their 75th and 2016 being their 70th).  To be fair, I've never really noticed much of a difference between the sets called "Infinity" and the ones called "Masterpiece".  BBM has not announced how many cards are in the set but, as usual, it looks like most of them are for baseball players.  The list only includes OB players - and OB players who are actually retired as opposed to active in MLB OB players.  Some of the players are Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Isao Harimoto and one foreign player - Warren Cromartie.  Other sports represented in the set include softball, soccer, rugby, basketball, volleyball, tennis, table tennis, badminton, pickleball, bowling, gymnastics, diving, sumo, judo and pro wrestling.  The set will be released in late October.

Summer Offerings

As usual, I feel like I blinked and a month passed since the last time I did a round up of the recently announced sets.  So let's get to the new batch of announcements...

- I'm somewhat astonished but Topps is actually releasing a second 2026 NPB set while the baseball season is still happening.  Hell, the release date for this year's edition of the Stadium Club NPB set is July 10th, so it'll hit the stores before the All Star break.  Considering that the 2024 edition didn't come out until December of that year and last year's wasn't until September, this is a major development for them.  Like their flagship set, the details for the set are a little sparse but again, I'm assuming it's a 216 card set.  There are at least "Beam Team" insert cards and I assume there are a couple other insert sets but, again, they're not listed.  There will be relic cards for active NPB players and autographed cards for both active and retired NPB players as well as active Japanese MLB players.  The big new gimmick that Topps has added for this set is image variations for 24 players (which I assume means two per team).  I mock Topps' NPB sets quite a bit but I have to admit that Stadium Club NPB is pretty good (at least the 2024 edition was).

- BBM's annual cheerleader/dance squad set - "Dancing Heroine" - will be released in mid August.  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.  

- Genesis, BBM's annual high-end set will be released in late September.  As has been standard for the entire run of the set (since 2012), the base set will contain 120 cards - ten per team which splits up as nine player cards and a team checklist.  No one really cares about the base set though 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 six "High-grade insert card" sets - Elite Of Nine, Game Changer, Unrivaled, Cross Forest, Combo Cross Foil Signing and Treasure.  

- The latest "Premier Edition" team set from Epoch is for the Dragons and will be released on July 11th.  The base set will contain 45 cards - 42 for active players, one for Doala, the mascot and two for coaches Takuya Asao and Nobumasa Fukuda (using photos from when they were players) - and there is, of course, 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 seven different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" (43), "Star" (3), "Rookie" (9), "Legendary" (2) and three types of multiple player autographed cards -  "Combo" (1), "Dragons Combo" (4) and "Rookie Combo" (5).  I don't know what the difference between "Combo" and "Dragons Combo" is.  

- Epoch will be releasing their annual Pacific League Rookies box set on July 25th.  This year's edition will have 38 cards - a 35 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 fall's draftees from the six Pacific League teams (regular phase of the draft only - there are no development players included).  There are three types of autographed cards available of all 35 players and the first round picks also have a "baseball" autograph.

- I missed that SCC had issued their 2026 KBO Collection set on the 20th of last month, just three weeks before their Festa set that I erroneously said was the first KBO set for 2026.  The base set (or at least the "normal" portion of it) will contain 290 cards which will include 10 cards for retired players.  The other 280 cards feature two cards for 14 players on each of the ten KBO teams - one showing the player in their home uniform and one showing them in their away uniform.  There are 112 "Alphabet" cards which each feature a player superimposed on a letter that spells the team's name.  There's two versions for each letter for each team, one showing a pitcher and one showing a batter.  So for the LG Twins, there's two cards with a player superimposed over a letter "T", two cards with a letter "W", etc.  Obviously each team has a different number of these cards although each team has at least 10 (I'm guessing they did the full name of the "KT Wiz") and the SSG Landers having 14.  There are 80 "Hologam" cards - 7 for each team plus the 10 retired players - and each "Hologram" has a parallel version available.  There are 30 "Victory Charm" cards - three from each team.  These appear to be some sort of partially transparent card.  I think there's 77 autographed cards available - 67 for active players (with either six or seven per team) and one for each of the OB players.

New Acquisitions

I thought I'd do a quick post about some cards I recently picked up.  It's been about 18 months since I stopped buying new stuff but I do get a hankering every so often to get some new ones.

I put in an order with COMC in mid-April but, of course, I didn't actually receive the cards until late May.  I had decided to get serious about replacing a couple old Calbee cards that I'd picked up on my last trip to Japan two years ago but I was only able to find one of the cards.  I'd brought home this card of Shitoshi Sekimoto from the "Florida Project" subset of the 1974/75 Calbee set (#708) that someone had used a pencil to highlight Sekimoto on:

The new version looks much better:

Since I was already ordering from COMC, I figured I'd look around and see if there was anything else I wanted at a reasonable price.  I decided to pick up this card of Masato Morishita because (1) I've been a fan of Morishita since seeing him pitch for Meiji back in 2019 and (2) I wanted to have an example of the 1990 inserts from last year's Topps NPB set (#90-7):

I also picked up a couple cards from the 2023 Topps World Baseball Classic set.  I picked up the "image variant" of Masataka Yoshida's card (#91):

I already had the base version:

I also grabbed the "Captains Of The World Baseball Classic" insert card of Ha-seong Kim (#CC-14):

Moving on to some stuff I ordered from Ebay...

I'm kind of low key trying to get one of each of the autographed cards for the Samurai Japan Collegiate team that were in the 2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set.  This card of Ryuta Hirose got me halfway there:

Since the remaining 14 cards I need to complete the set include Misho Nishikawa, Seiya Watanabe, Rui Muneyama and Natsuki Takeuchi, I'm not expecting to ever actually finish the set.  As I've always said, I'm cheap, so I'm not willing to pay what it'd take to get those cards.  But I'll keep trying to get the low hanging fruit when I can.

The last two cards are for Rintaro Sasaki of Stanford University.  Sasaki was drafted last fall's NPB draft by the Hawks and is potentially going to get taken in next month's MLB draft.  The Hawks' rights for him expire at the end of July so he can see if any MLB teams are interested before deciding if he wants to join Softbank.  Panini has done about a gazillion cards of him (with another two gazillion parallels) so I decided to pick up a card of him from each of the past two years.  Generally I find Panini's cards kind of hideous but I was able to find two that weren't too bad.  This 2024 Onyx Vintage Extended card (#OVRISA) show him in what I think is a Trenton Thunder uniform with all the logos airbrushed/photoshopped off:

The 2025 Prizm card (#271) shows him in his Stanford uniform:

This batch of cards scratched an itch for a bit.  Ryan's still picking stuff up for me and, while I try not to take him for granted, Kenny's probably preparing another envelope of goodies for me, so I'm sure to be getting some more new stuff soon.

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!

Cards From Kenny

On Saturday, I received another envelope that Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) was kind enough to send me from Japan.  As I always say, I'm not sure why Kenny has decided to be so generous to me but I'm happy and grateful that he has.  

This latest envelope contained three cards.  The first two were two more of the Calbee "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" cards like he had previous sent me.   Both of these cards were from the set that came out at the end of January (as opposed to the beginning of last December):

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-49 (Trey Cabbage)

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-68 (Kota Tatsu)

The final card was from last year's Topps NPB set and is of Nikita Moiseev, the second pick of the Swallows in the 2024 draft.  Moiseev is kind of an interesting story.  My first thought when I saw this card was that, like Louis Okoye and other players with Western names, one of his parents must have been Japanese.  That's not the case, though, Moiseev's parents are both Russians living in Aichi prefecture.  I don't think he's a Japanese citizen, but because he attended a Japanese high school, he was subject to the NPB draft.  

2025 Topps NPB #197

Moiseev made his ichi-gun debut on Friday, the day before I got his card.

Thanks again for the cards, Kenny!

2026 Topps Now WBC Cards

With the WBC wrapping up last night, Topps has put their final Topps Now cards for the tournament up for sale.  I'm a bit surprised at how few cards they did this year.  The first time they did Topps Now cards for the WBC - back in 2017 - they did 64 total cards (plus three Spanish language parallels).  For the 2023 WBC, they did 73 Topps Now cards.  That's just the single cards and not the various team sets that were also for sale both years.  This year's set had only 43 cards plus a short printed image variation for Shohei Ohtani and an unnumbered card featuring both Ohtani and John Cena.

There were only four cards featuring members of Samurai Japan.  I swiped the images of the cards from Topps' website:

#WB4

#W9

#W10

#WB15

If you bought the Ohtani card, you had a shot at getting the image variation card or an autographed memorabilia card as well:

#W4 (image variant)

Here's the card with both Ohtani and Cena:

Team Korea had their best showing in the WBC since 2009 but that was only good enough to earn them two cards in the Topps Now set.  Both cards featured events in Korea's 11-4 victory over the Czech Republic on October 5th:

#W2

#W3

Topps says on their website that "Select hobby products will feature WBC-inspired inserts later this year."  I wonder if that means they won't be doing sets only available from their website (like the "Global Stars" and "World Baseball Classic" sets from 2023).  I will try to post about what else they produce this year but since I don't monitor MLB cards very closely, it wouldn't surprise me if I miss stuff.

Topps Now World Baseball Classic Cards

The World Baseball Classic kicked off today and, for the third time, Topps is issuing Topps Now cards for it.  So far there are only three cards available from the two games that were played today  - Travis Bazzana of Australia and Bo Gyeong Moon and Shay Witcomb of Korea.  All the cards will be listed on both Topps' US website and their Japanese website.   The cards are $8.99 each on the US site and 1485 yen on the Japanese one.  These three cards will apparently be on sale for 48 hours instead of what I thought was the standard 24 as they'll be available until 5:15 PM EST on March 7th.  I'm going to make a guess that Topps will release new cards at 5:15 EST for at least the next two days and then we'll see what happens on Sunday when most of the US switches to Daylight Savings Time.  My expectation is that the cards will go on sale at 6:15 EDT then but that's just a guess.

In addition to the single cards, Topps is also selling Topps Now team sets for six of the teams in the tournament - USA, Japan, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Korea and Puerto Rico.  The sets for the US, Japan, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are $59.99 each (9900 yen on the Japanese site) and contain 13 cards - the 12 card base set plus one extra card that is either a parallel or an autographed card (I guess they've taken inspiration from BBM's box sets).  The Korea and Puerto Rico sets are $49.99 each (8250 yen) and have only 11 cards each - a 10 card base set plus the parallel or autograph card.  These sets will be available until 2:45 PM EDT on March 16th.

The twelve players listed for the Samurai Japan set are Shohei Ohtani, Seiya Suzuki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto, Kensuke Kondo, Yusei Kikuchi, Tomoyuki Sugano, Hiromi Itoh, Masataka Yoshida, Shugo Maki and Kaito Kozono.  There are seven different parallels available for all 12 players but there are only autographed cards available for four of them - Ohtani, Yamamoto, Murakami and Okamoto.

The ten Korean players are Jung Hoo Lee, Hyeseong Kim, Woo-Suk Go, Hyun Jin Ryu, Shay Whitcomb, Jahmai Jones, Dane Dunning, Do Yeong Kim, Hyun Min Ahn and Ju Won Kim.  Parallels are only available for the Jung Hoo Lee and Hyeseong Kim and Jung Hoo Lee is also the autograph available.

3/6 UPDATE - Checked Topps' website at 5:15 EST-ish and they've only added one card.  It was actually added earlier today.  The new card is for Shohei Ohtani's grand slam and is a little more expensive as it is $11.99 in the US and 1980 yen in Japan.  Apparently the difference in price is due to the possibility of getting a autographed and/or memorabilia card or an image variant card with it.  The card will be available until 2:45 EDT on Sunday, March 8th.

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!

2025 In Review - Topps

It was pretty much business as usual for Topps with their NPB products in 2025.  For the third straight year, they issued four sets but they managed to spread them out a little more during the year rather than bunch almost all of them at the end of the year like they did in 2024.

They issued their flagship "NPB" set in June.  Their next set. "Stadium Club NPB", was published in September.  "NPB Chrome" followed in October and "Finest NPB" came out in November.  All four sets had base sets of 216 cards although I don't believe that the same players appeared in all four sets.

This is the fifth year that Topps has done cards for the NPB market and they've done different sets each year.  They've issued a total of 17 sets over that time - two in 2021, three in 2022, and four each in 2023, 2024 and 2025.  They've done the "flagship" "NPB" set each year as well as the "NPB Chrome" set.  The "Chrome" set has changed somewhat over the years as the first two years it was simply an ugly parallel version of the "NPB" set but since 2023 has been a completely different set with different photos and checklist.  Three other sets have only had two editions - "Bowman NPB" (2022-23), "206 NPB" (2023-24) and "Stadium Club NPB" (2024-25).  "Finest NPB" so far has only had the 2025 edition.  

For the second year, Topps issued Topps Now cards for NPB teams.  I have been unable to determine, however, how many of the teams they did the cards for or even how many cards they issued this year.  Topps' Japanese website - on the rare occasions where it doesn't automatically redirect me to the US one - doesn't appear to have any archive information about what cards they've issued easily available.

Topps apparently lost the license to do Samurai Japan cards at the beginning of the year as both Epoch and Bushiroad did Samurai Japan related sets but they apparently regained the license towards the end of the year.  They issued six Topps Now cards for the team that played a couple friendly matches against Korea in November.

A Couple Surprises

I was away for work last week when I learned about a couple new items that I hadn't been expecting so here's a quick post to get us all up-to-date...

- Steve, a trading partner from years gone by, sent me an email last week to let me know that Topps had issued Topps Now cards for the Samurai Japan team that played a couple friendlies against Korea a few weeks ago.  There are six cards in all, four from the game on November 15th (Tai Sasaki, Misho Nishikawa, Seishiro Sakamoto and Isami Nomura) and two from November 16th (Yumeto Kanemaru and Kazuma Okamoto).  The cards are each 1485 yen (around $9.50) and will be on sale until December 26th.  It does not appear that Topps will ship these cards to the US.  It would not surprise me a lot if Topps also issued a team set after these cards have sold out.  (I am surprised that Topps is doing Samurai Japan cards since both Epoch and DreamOrder did them earlier this year.)

- Speaking of surprises, Calbee issued a set last week.  This would be the third off season in a row that Calbee has issued a set following the Hawks set in the 2023-24 off season and the "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" video game tie-in set from last year.  The new set is another tie in to the "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" video game but, unlike the set from last January, this set only has 24 cards instead of the 47 that the earlier set had (it was originally planned to be 48 cards but apparently the set was delayed which caused them to have to remove the Roki Sasaki card from the set since he had signed with the Dodgers).  Calbee managed to get this set out before the end of the year which allowed them to not have to pull the Munetaka Murakami from it.  You can see all the cards (including some of the kira parallels) over at Jambalaya - they look very similar to the earlier set, just with a different background.

Rich Gossage

I had mentioned a while back that Topps had included autographed cards of Rich Gossage into a couple of their NPB products.  To the best of my knowledge, Gossage, who had spent the 1990 season with the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, had never had a Japanese baseball card before this.  I got an email from Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) today in which he sent me an image of Gossage’s card from the Topps NPB Chrome set that he had swiped from an online auction:

I’m a bit curious why they didn’t include the team name on the card but it wouldn’t be Topps if they didn’t do something that makes me scratch my head.

I mock Topps a lot but I’m impressed that they’ve gotten some interesting OB players to sign cards for them.  For example, they’ve had what are pretty much the first NPB cards of Hideo Nomo since 1994.  I’d be more impressed (or at least more interested) if they’d issue base set cards of these guys rather than only rare and expensive autographed cards.

UPDATE - Fuji mentioned in a comment seeing a different autographed Gossage NPB card on Ebay so I took a look and found that he also had cards in both the 2025 Topps NPB and Stadium Club NPB sets.  I swiped the images:

I think both of these are better looking cards (mostly because I don't like the Chrome cards) but it's interesting that neither one identifies the team.

Ending 2025 On A (Mostly) High (End) Note

It's been a bit since my last round up of the upcoming card releases so I thought I should get caught up.  I suspect that these are the last of the 2025 releases but it wouldn't be the first time I thought the card manufacturers were finished for a year and then found out I was wrong.  All but one of these releases are on the high end of the price scale.

- We'll start with the release that's not super expensive.  BBM is releasing a box set for the Fighters called "Great Voyage" in mid-December.  Each box contains the entire 36 card base set plus one "special insert card".  The base set contains 24 cards of "young" Fighters players including Hiromi Itoh, Kotaro Kiyomiya, Koki Kitayama and Yuya Gunji plus all six of the 2024 draftees/2025 rookie class.  The base set also contains 12 "combination" cards and I'm guessing that all 24 of the players appear on one of those cards but I don't know that for sure.  The "special insert card" could possibly be a foil signed card or (I think) a memorabilia card.  Again, I'm not sure but I think the memorabilia cards are only for the 2024 draftees - one of them is combination card featuring all six players.  I don't think there are any actual autograph cards available.  Unopened boxes will retail for 5500 yen or roughly $36.

- Moving on to the more expensive stuff, BBM will release their "ultra high-end" "Glory" set on November 28th.  Boxes will contain just six cards and retail for 26,400 yen or about $172.  There are 36 cards (three active players from each NPB team) in the base set, each of which has a parallel.  I think the base cards are /2000 but I don't know what the parallels are.  There are two possible inserts - "MIYABI" (six cards, each /50 with an even more limited parallel) and "Glorius 3D" (12 cards, each /25).  The big attraction is, of course, the memorabilia and autographed cards.  The memorabilia cards include "super patch" cards as well as combo and triple ones.

- BBM's "ultra high-end" multi-sport set "Crown" will be released at the end of December.  Like "Glory", this set will be sold in six card boxes that will retail for 26,400 yen.  All the cards in the set are serially numbered but I don't know what any of them are numbered to.  The base set has 48 cards, 18 of which will feature baseball players - 9 OB and 9 active.  There are four insert sets although two of them - "Velvet" and "Jet" - could be considered parallels of the base cards as there are 48 cards in each of those sets.  The "Velvet" cards are "made of brushed material" while the "Jet" cards are "made from jet black special paper".  The other two insert sets are "Foil Autumn" (24 cards on "hologram paper") and "Sparkling" (12 3D cards).  And, of course, there are tons of autographed cards although no memorabilia cards.  Each box is guaranteed to include at least one autographed card.

- Epoch has announced two more of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets.  The "Hawks Stars & Legends" set will be released on November 29th and the "Tigers Stars & Legends" set will be out on December 6th.  Both sets will be sold in boxes of four cards (well, two "mini-boxes" of two cards) for 18,700 yen or about $122.  The Hawks base set will contain 64 cards (41 active players and 23 OB players) while the Tigers set base set will contain 45 cards (25 active player and 20 OB players).  I think all the base cards are serially numbered but, again, I don't know what the counts are.  Both sets have what seems to be the standard "Stars & Legend" set inserts - three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with six "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  The Hawks set will have four different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" (64 cards), "Star" (two cards), "Rookie" (six cards) and "Legendary" (20 cards).  The Tigers set also has four different types of autographed cards but they're slightly different - "Authentic" (45 cards), "Star" (21 cards), "Legendary" (18 cards) and "Baseball" (six cards).  The "Baseball" ones are on pieces of actual baseballs.

 - Topps has announced that their fourth NPB set for 2025 will be "Finest".  Boxes containing 15 packs of four cards will retail for 9900 yen (~$65) and will be released on November 14th.  The base set contains 216 cards (as usual) which breaks down to 18 cards per team (as usual).  Those 18 cards will contain cards for the team's manager and top three 2024 draft picks (also as usual).  There are four 24 card insert sets - "The Man", "Finest Fortune", "Creators" and "1993 Baseball's Finest".  According to the checklist for the set, there are a ton of autographed cards available.  Looks like ten players for each team along with a bunch of NPB Legends.  The Legends include a number of current MLB players like Shohei Ohtani, Masataka Yoshida, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Yu Darvish and Shota Imanga along with Ichiro, Norichika Aoki, Sadaharu Oh, Hideo Nomo and Cecil Fielder.  The only memorabilia cards available are all for Ichiro - a "relic", a "Topps Sterling Jumbo Letter Patch Card" and a "Topps Dynasty Autograph Patch Card".

Autumn Issues

I had been planning all of last week to do a "New Releases" post but it kept getting delayed for one thing or another.  I didn't think it would take too long, though, as there were only three sets that had been announced in the last month or so.  But then Friday, Epoch, Topps and BBM all made announcements so the number of new sets to talk about doubled.  So I'd better get moving before they announce more...

- Fusion, BBM's season-in-review set, is back for the tenth year.  This is kind of a kitchen-sink Franken-set that's basically got four independent parts - a 99 card combination active-OB player subset that recaps the year; 25 "1st Version Update" cards featuring players who did not make it into either the 1st or 2nd Version sets for whatever reason; 20 "Monthly MVP" cards and an unspecified number of short-printed "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards.  The "1st Version Update" cards will include players who returned from MLB in mid-season like Shintaro Fujinami and Koyo Aoyagi as well as late signing foreign players like Luke Voit.  The "Monthly MVP" subset is new as previous editions of the set had a 24 card "Title Holders" featuring all the statistical leaders for the year.  I'm not sure why BBM decided to go with monthly MVP winners instead and I'm not sure I like the change (not that BBM is going to care what I think).  There's also the usual insert sets - the 24 "Great Records" cards which highlight milestones reached by two active players from each team; the 12 "Legendary Player" cards which feature one OB player from each team and the serially numbered premium inserts of "Treasure" (12 cards) and "Esperanza" (24 cards).  There are also autographed cards available for both the active and OB players.  The set will be released in late November.

- Epoch's NPB Luxury Collection is back for the fourth year and for the fourth year, the format of the set has completely changed.  The 2022 version was basically a "Chrome-ified" version of a subset of the regular NPB set - almost all the cards in the Luxury version used the same photo as the regular set.  The 2023 version was basically a completely different set that used the same format as the regular NPB set that year - all the photos were different and there was at least one player in the Luxury version that didn't appear in the regular set.  Epoch went the "ultra high-end" route with last year's set where boxes containing just nine cards sold for 23,760 yen (about $160).  Each of the 108 base set cards were serially numbered to 86.  This year's version has gotten even more exclusive - the price for the box hasn't changed but the box now contains just six cards (at least one of which is an autograph).  The base set is now just 36 cards - 3 per team including each team's top two 2024 draft picks.  I assume they're all serially numbered but I don't know how many there are of each card.  There are parallel versions of the base cards, a 24 card "NPB Stars" insert set, a 12 card "Gem" premium insert set (with various parallels) and a boat load of autograph and memorabilia cards.  The set will be released on October 25th.

- The NPB Luxury Collection is not the only "ultra high-end" set coming out from Epoch.  On the same day, Epoch will be releasing the annual Pacific League Premier Edition set in six card boxes that will retail for 17,600 yen (roughly $120).  The base set has 54 cards - nine per team - and there's a 24 card "Pacific League Superstars" insert set which has parallel versions available.  There are 18 premium insert "Gem" cards that also have parallel versions and autographed cards for all the players who appear in the base set.  There are various types of memorabilia cards available as well including ones that are autographed.

- Epoch's first "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team set will be released on November 1st.  Three card boxes of Giants Stars & Legends with Memorabilia will retail for 16500 (about $112).  The base set has 56 cards - 23 for active players and 33 for OB players (including Sadaharu Oh and the late Shigeo Nagashima).  There are three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with nine "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  The memorabilia cards referred to by the set title are bat cards for six active players.  The set also includes several different types of autographed cards.  All the autographed cards are for OB players because the Giants do not allow authentic autographed cards for any of their active players.

- Topps is finally issuing some more NPB sets for this year.  They announced the NPB Stadium Club set a few weeks back and while the information about it on Trading Card Journal says the set will be released on September 26, the information about it on Topps' Japanese website doesn't have a release date.  Neither site lists useful information like how big the set is but since they've posted a checklist, we know that the base set has the usual 216 cards (18 per team which includes the manager and the top three 2024 draft picks).  There are four 24 card insert sets - "Beam Team", "Concentration", "Savage Sluggers" and "Stadium Shots" - and the usual plethora of autographed cards of current NPB players, Japanese MLB players and "NPB Legends".  I mock Topps for doing a half-assed job on most of their NPB products but I have to admit that I'm impressed by two of the "NPB Legends" that they've has included autographs for.  The first is MLB Hall Of Famer Rich Gossage, who made 28 appearances with the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in 1990 and, to my knowledge, has never appeared on an NPB card before.  The second is Hideo Nomo, who has not pretty much not appeared on an NPB card since 1994 (with the exception of the 2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 cards that don't have his photo on them and an SGA card from a 2018 Meikyukai game at Tokyo Dome).  If you're patient, you might be able to pick this set up super-cheap like Sean did with last year's version.

- Topps has also announced their annual NPB Chrome set.  Once again, I can't say for sure when the set will be released (their website says September 30th while Trading Card Journal says October 14th) or how big the base set is - I'm guessing 216 cards again.  Like the past two years, this year's edition is not simply an ugly parallel version of the set they released last summer but will have an entirely different checklist with different photos.  (OK, I acknowledge that not everyone shares my opinion that cards with the Chrome finish are ugly.)  There are four insert sets - "Helix-Power Players", "1990 Topps Baseball", "Kanji Variation" and "NPB Gamers" - but I don't know how big any of them are although I'd guess 24 cards.  This set also has autographed cards available from active and "legendary" NPB players and Japanese MLB players.  I expect that both this set and the Stadium Club set will have a boatload of parallels but their promotional material doesn't list them.