2017 BBM Genesis set

For the first time ever, I picked up this year's edition of BBM's high end set Genesis.  I bought a base set which was relatively cheap (1500 yen on Yahoo! Japan Auctions before my Noppin fees) but doesn't provide any of the autograph or memorabilia cards that are the main attraction of the Genesis set.  But I had my reasons - four of them as it turned out - that I'll get into in a minute.

The base set consists of 120 cards - 108 player cards plus 12 checklist cards.  So that's 9 player cards per team plus a checklist card.  The player cards are numbered 1 to 108 and the checklists are separately numbered CL01 to CL12.

Because it's released in mid-September, a month or so after 2nd Version came out, Genesis obviously goes to press a little later than 2nd Version.  In fact the backs of the cards include statistics for the season up to June 19.  This gives BBM a chance to include in Genesis some foreign players who may not have made their debut in time to be in an earlier set.  This year there are four players who appear in Genesis but do not appear in any other BBM issue so far this year (although they may show up in the yet to be released Fusion set) - Wily Mo Pena and Roel Santos of the Marines, Xavier Batista of the Carp and Chris Marrero of the Buffaloes.  Getting cards of the four of them is why I decided to pull the trigger on the set this year.  The other players in the set are pretty much who you'd expect - Shohei Ohtani, Seiya Suzuki, Yuki Yanagita, Takehiro Arai, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh, Tetsuto Yamada, Takehiro Norimoto, Tomoyuki Sugano and Hayato Sugano among others - plus several of the major rookies from this season - Sosuke Genda, Yota Kyoda, Haruhiro Hamaguchi and Chihaya Sasaki for example.  There are no manager cards in the set.

The cards themselves are pretty attractive (although they don't scan well at all).  I generally prefer borderless cards but that's not what these are.  They have a small photo taking up maybe 75% of the front of the card floating in a sea of white and bordered by gold curlicues.  Somehow I still like them.  Here's some examples (again - they don't scan well):

#061

#031

#106

#052

#041

#008

#024

#085

#073

#071

 Here's what the back of the cards looks like:

#010

Here's what the checklist cards look like - this is obviously one of the least imaginative things BBM has ever done.  And I think this is pretty much what the checklist cards have looked like every year that Genesis has been published (since 2012):

#CL12

One odd thing about the checklist cards is that they are much thicker than the player cards.  I suspect that this is to make it harder to figure out if a pack holds a memorabilia card or not but I could be mistaken.

I'm not sorry I picked this set up but I'm not going to commit to getting it next year.  It'll be interesting to see if the four players that drove me to pick up the set show up in the Fusion set in November - if I'd known BBM was going to do that set again this year I might have skipped this one until I saw who was in Fusion.

UPDATE - forgot to mention that you can see all the cards (in much better scans than mine) at Jambalaya.

New BBM and Epoch releases

Just wanted to take a minute to cover some recent announcements of new sets by both BBM and Epoch...

- BBM's annual Rookie Edition Premium box set will be released in late October (Jambalaya says it'll be out on October 26th).  Each box contains 38 cards - the 36 card base set plus 2 "premium" cards.  The base set highlights the top three rookies for each team.  The "premium" cards can possibly be autographed cards, memorabilia cards or "booklet' cards.  Some of the cards could have more than one autograph on them - there's one both of the likely Rookies Of Year - Yota Kyoda of the Dragons and Sosuke Genda of the Lions - has signed.  MSRP for the set is 15,000 yen (roughly $135).

- Last year BBM released a mult-sport set called "Masterpiece" to celebrate their 70th Anniversary as a magazine published.  It apparently was popular enough that they are releasing another multi-sport called "Infinity".  There aren't actually a whole lot of details about the set on BBM's website - it's a pack-based set but I can't tell you how big the base set is or what the insert sets are for sure.  There are both active and OB baseball players in the set including Yuki Yanagita, Shinnosuke Abe, Takahiro Arai, Kosuke Fukudome, Shunsuke Watanabe, Norihiro Nakamura and Daisuke Miura.  Other sports include sumo, soccer, rugby, track and field, wrestling, tennis, gymnastics, boxing, curling and softball.  There will be autographed cards available which will include Shohei Ohtani.  The set will be out in late October (Jambalaya says the 29th).

- Another set BBM did for the first time last year that they are apparently turning into an annual issue is the Fusion set.  The breakdown of this set looks pretty much the same as last year's set - the base set is split into four subsets - "1st Version Update" (9 cards), "Ceremonial First Pitch" (BBM doesn't list the number of cards here but I'm betting there will be 9), "Hall Of Fame" (102 cards that include both active and OB players who aren't necessarily Hall Of Famers) and "Title Holders" (24 cards for the leaders of 12 different statistical categories for each league).  The total number of cards in the base set will probably be 144 depending on how many cards are in the "Ceremonial First Pitch" set.  BBM will once again be doing "secret" versions of one or more of the "Hall Of Fame" cards and Ami Imamura will once again be appearing in the "Ceremonial First Pitch" set.  There will be two insert sets - "Great Records" (24 cards) and "Legendary Players" (12 cards) and assorted autograph cards available.  The set will be released in late November.

- Epoch is releasing two high-end team based sets in November.  On November 4th the Hawks Stars & Legends set will hit the streets.  Each box has an MSRP of 12,960 yen and I think contains two packs of three cards each (6 cards total).  But the box is guaranteed to include two "special insert" cards including one autographed card.  The other possible "special insert" cards include jersey and jersey letter cards.  The base set itself is only 24 cards and includes both active and OB Hawks players.  The other set is the Carp Stars & Legends set and it will be out on November 18th.  Each box of this set also has an MSRP of 12,960 yen but I think it contains two packs of FOUR cards each (8 cards total).  As with the Hawks set, each box is guaranteed to contain two "special insert" cards which includes one autographed card.  Other possible "special insert" cards include jersey, jersey letter and patch cards.  The base set contains 55 cards which I assume include both active and OB Carp players.

2017 Epoch Tigers "Master" set

Ryan somehow picked me up a "master" set for the 2017 Epoch Tigers set.  Well, I guess it's really not a "master" set as it doesn't include any signature parallels or inserts but it does include all of the variants of the base cards.  This is somewhat less complicated than some of the other Epoch team sets as there are only two sets of variants rather than five(!).

My post here is going to kind of echo what Ryan's already written about the set but hopefully I've got some new things to say about the set.  The base set has 36 cards - 8 of which are the Tigers' 2016 draft class.  The base set also includes cards for manager Tomoaki Kanemoto and ni-gun manager Masayuki Kakefu (aka Mr Tigers).  The set pretty much has everyone you'd expect - Kosuke Fukudome, Takeshi Toritani, Randy Messenger, Yoshio Itoi, Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Shintaro Fujinami, etc.

There are 36 "1 *" variants for the set so (obviously) one for each card in the set.  Ryan says that these are all photo variants but I have to disagree with him - the majority of them are actually crop variants.  There are only four actual photo variants among the "1 *"s - Fujinami, Fumiya Hojoh, Itoi and Toritani.  There are 18 "2 *" variants for the set that are all photo variants.  So the total number of cards that I have for this set is 90.

Here's some examples of the variants - first all three of the Itoi cards (base card on the left, then "1 *" variant, then "2 *" variant:

#31 

As Ryan points out the backs for all three cards are identical except for the "*" or "**" on the bottom left of the cards.  This is obviously how you tell if the card is a one or two star variant.  Note that the photo on the back is still the one from the base card:

Backs of #31

Just for comparison, here are the base card and "1 *" variant for Kosuke Fukudome so you can see what a cropped variant looks like:

#32

I've probably beaten the variant stuff to death now so I'll just show off a couple more cards from the set.  (As always you can see them all at Jambalaya.)

#02

#35

#24 (1 * variant)

#27 (2 * variant)

One other thing Ryan included with the set is the promo card of Kento Itohara.  As he points out in his post, this is a very odd promo card in that it doesn't look much like the regular cards in the set.  Really the only thing the promo card and the regular card of Itohara have in common is the photo on the card.  Here's the promo card:

Promo

 Here's the regular card:

#30

Weird, huh?  I wonder if the promo was a design Epoch thought of using and decided against after they already printing the promo.

Card Of The Week October 8

Shohei Ohtani made what is very probably his last pitching appearance in Japan on Wednesday, throwing a complete game shutout with 10 strikeouts in the Fighters' 3-0 win over Orix (he also hit cleanup in the game.  He is expected to play in the Fighters game against the Eagles tomorrow which is likely the last time he plays in a game in Japan as it is the Fighters' last game of the season.

All of this is with the expectation that he will head to MLB this offseason in some manner - whether it be via the posting system (which is up in the air at the moment) or by Nippon-Ham making him a free agent.  We shall see what happens over the next few months.

In the meantime, here's a card of Ohtani from last year's Epoch Fighters Season Summary set (#01):

Here are the highlights of Wednesday's game:

2017 Epoch Team Sets

Getting back to the stuff Ryan sent me last week...

Epoch released reasonably priced team sets for eight of the twelve NPB teams this past summer (basically between mid-June and the end of August).  When I say reasonably priced, I mean that a box of 20 packs containing 4 cards each had an MSRP of 5000 yen ($45-ish).  Autographed cards were not included in the product but there was some sort of scratch off card included in every pack that allowed you to accumulate points to redeem for autographed cards.

Epoch did sets for the Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Carp, Lions, Swallows, Baystars, and Giants (or in other words all the Central League teams plus the Hawks and Lions).  Each set had between 27 and 36 cards in the base set and most sets had parallel issues and insert cards.  And variants.  Oh God are there variants.  Epoch took BBM's "secret" version idea from their 1st and 2nd Version sets and went completely overboard with it.  Many of the cards in the sets have variants that may be a recropping of the photo on the original card, a new photo altogether or a recropping of the new photo.  It's bewildering trying to keep track of it all.

I put together a table trying to summarize what's in each set and to make an attempt to organize the information on the variants.  Ryan has already done some of this in his posts on the Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Carp, Lions, Swallows and Baystars sets (he hasn't done a post on the Giants set yet) so I'm summarizing some of what he's deciphered (as well as checking out what Jambalaya has on-line).

Set	Size	Rookie Cards	1 * Variants	2 * Variants	3 * Variants	4 * Variants	5 * Variants
Dragons	30	6	? HDR	? crop of regular	? photo	? crop of 3 *
Hawks	27	4	24 crop of regular	22 photo	14 crop of regular	9 crop of 2 *	6 crop of 2*
Tigers	36	8	36 crop/photo	18 photo
Carp	35	6	29 HDR	12 crop of regular	12 photo	6 crop of 3 *
Lions	27	6	? crop of regular	? crop of regular	? photo	? crop of 3*	? crop of 3 *
Swallows	30	6	24 crop of regular	12 crop of regular	6 photo	6 crop of 3*?
Baystars	27	9	27 crop of regular	11 photo	22 crop of regular	8 crop of 2 *	6 crop of 2 *
Giants	36	3	36 crop/photo	? crop/photo	? photo?	? HDR

The type of each variant is indicated by the number of stars on the back of the card.  What I tried to do was put the identify the number of variants and what they were.  "Photo" means it's a different photo than the regular card, "crop" means it's a recropping of either the regular card or a photo variant and HDR means it's a "High Dynamic Range" image - it's had some fancy image processing done on it to make it look sharper.

OK, so after all that talk about the variants...I don't have any except for the Tigers set.  I had asked Ryan to pick up just the base sets for these sets as the base sets could be had for 500 yen each while the sets with all the variants were much more.  He picked me up a "master" set for the Tigers but the rest of the sets were just the base sets.  I assume he got some good deal on the Tigers set but I haven't gotten the details from him yet.  

I'm going to deal with the Tigers set in a separate post so let's talk about the other seven sets.  They're...ok.  Don't get me wrong - I'm glad I got them.  But they won't make me stop getting BBM or Calbee.  All the sets have a different design and the designs range from somewhat attractive (the Carp and Tigers sets) to functional (the Hawks, Lions and Baystars sets) to kind of dark and ugly (the Dragons and Giants sets).  The Swallows set is in a different category - the design is nice but I don't like the "diagonal line filter" they added to the background of every photo.

As for the content of each set - all the sets except for the Swallows includes a card of the team's manager.  The Carp and Swallows sets also include a card for their mascot (and there are variants for those cards as well).  The Swallows set also includes an additional card for Tetsuto Yamada celebrating his "Triple Three" from last year - .300+ batting average, 30+ home runs and 30 steals.  The sets pretty much have the big stars from each team as well as a bunch of fan favorites - the Hawks set has Daisuke Matsuzaka in it for example.  

Each team set except the Giants includes the team's entire 2016 draft class.  The Giants for some reason only have half of their class of six players included and it's picks #1, #2 and #4.  One of my gripes about a couple of the sets (other than my usual complaint about the number of rookies crowding out other players from being in the set) is that the photos for the rookies are either headshots or photos like the ones in BBM's Rookie Edition sets rather than game or training shots.

OK, enough talk - here's some sample cards:

 2017 Epoch Dragons #24

2017 Epoch Dragons #21

2017 Epoch Hawks #16

2017 Epoch Hawks #04

2017 Epoch Carp #02

2017 Epoch Carp #08

2017 Epoch Lions #22

2017 Epoch Lions #4

2017 Epoch Swallows #24

2017 Epoch Swallows #15

2017 Epoch Baystars #07

2017 Epoch Baystars #19

2017 Epoch Giants #33

2017 Epoch Giants #22

Ultimately I think these sets by Epoch are a nice attempt that fall a bit short.  They kind of feel like bad minor league team sets, especially the Dragons and Giants sets.  I think what I'd really like to see is Epoch try their hand at a full 300+ card "flagship" set like BBM and Calbee does rather than these team specific sets.  But I'm quite happy that Epoch did some sets that were affordable this year.

You can see the Dragons, Hawks, Carp, Lions, Swallows, Baystars and Giants sets (including parallels and variants) over at Jambalaya.

"2016" Vittum Foreign Attack Set

Yesterday I got my copy of Dan Skrezyna's self published set of foreign players from the KBO.  The set is called "Foreign Attack" and Dan's calling his card company "Vittum".  The set was printed up in the last month or so but it's labeled as a 2016 set and features all the foreign players in the KBO from last year.

The set contains 48 cards - 41 "regular" cards of the 2016 foreign players, 4 cards featuring the four foreign players to win KBO MVP over the years, 2 cards for the foreign batting and pitching leaders from last year and one checklist card.

The cards are beautiful.  Dan did a great job with the design of the cards - they remind me some of the Choice minor league cards from the late 1990's and early 2000's.  He did an exceptional job of choosing photos for the cards - there's a very good mix of action and candid shots.  All the "regular" cards have a photo on the back as well that's different than the one on the front.  I asked Dan where he got the photos from since he is a photographer.  He said that they all came from the internet.

Here's the front and back of Eric Thames' card as an example:

#28

Back of #28

You can see that there's a handwritten number on the back of the card - that number is on the back of every card.  Dan only made 20 of the sets.

Here's some more examples of the"regular" cards:

#6

#16

#21

#24

#32

#36

There is a notation on the back of Marte's card that mentions that he died last January.

There's a subset containing the four foreign players who have won the KBO MVP award over the years.  The players are Tyrone Woods (who won it in 1998 for the OB Bears), Danny Rios (Doosan in 2007), Eric Thames (NC in 2015) and Dustin Nippert (Doosan in 2016).  Here's the Rios card:

#43

The two foreign batting and pitching leader cards feature the top foreign player in three categories on the front of the card and list the top seven foreign players in six categories on the back.  Here's the Pitching Leader card:

#47

As you can probably tell, I really like this set.  I'm not usually a fan of "home-brew" cards but Dan's done an exceptional job (and he's not trying to mislead anyone that these are official KBO cards either).  If you're interested in picking one up, Dan says he has about five available.  You can contact him through his blog or on Twitter.

2017 Epoch Pacific League Set

Epoch put out a number of reasonably priced card sets this past summer.  I'll be posting about their individual team sets soon but I want to start off with their Pacific League set.

As you might expect from the name of the set, the Pacific League set features players from the six Pacific League teams.  The base set has 54 cards - nine from each team.  The player selection is kind of what you'd expect - most of the big stars for each team are included like Shohei Ohtani, Daichi Suzuki, Shogo Akiyama, Takeya Nakamura, Takahiro Norimoto, Yuki Matsui, Kazuo Matsui, Yuki Yanagita and T-Okada.  There are no foreign players in the set however, so no Brandon Laird, Ernesto Mejia or Alfredo Despaigne.  Each team's top pick from last fall's NPB draft is included (which makes this set the third I've written about lately to feature the number one picks from the 2016 draft after the Calbee Series Two and the Icons - Japan Pride sets).

The cards are fairly attractive, even though I tend to prefer borderless cards.  Here are some examples:

#26

#15

#39

#01

#32

#54

Epoch issued each of their cheaper sets with a bunch of variations and this set was no exception.  I didn't get anything beyond the base set however.  Ryan did a post about the set that showed some variations and Jambalaya has a bunch of them on their site (as well as the parallel issues).  And as you might expect, the first photo variant (as opposed to a simple photo crop variant) shows Ohtani pitching.

Last year Epoch did a high end Pacific League set and matched it with a Central League set that was issued with Kabaya gum (although the PL set was 54 cards and the CL set was only 36).  This year there has been no corresponding CL set but Epoch did issue inexpensive team sets for all six CL teams while only doing sets for two of the PL teams.  (There is also high end PL set that was issued by Epoch last week.)