Training camps are opening in Japan tomorrow (well, pretty much as I write this in the evening of January 31st on the US East Coast) and there's a couple new items that have popped up in the last day or so so I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

- For the second year in row, Calbee has issued an unexpected set in January.  Last year it was a 36 card team set for the Hawks that was probably delayed for a few months.  This year it's a 47 card set that's a tie-in to the video game "Pro Yakyu Spirits A".  The latest version of the game was released back in September so I suspect that Calbee meant to publish this set earlier.  UPDATE - according to a comment below from twycchang, the set is a tie-in to the mobile game "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" and not the one "Pro Yakyu Spirits" like I had originally thought although I still think the set was originally supposed to have been published earlier.  The cards all have a "cover date" of 2024.  47 is an odd number of cards for an NPB set to have but when you take a look at the checklist, you'll see what happened.  The checklist is arranged basically as four groups of 12 with each group having a player from each of the twelve NPB teams in it.  Well, that's how it was SUPPOSED to be but card #PS-11 did not get issued.  Extrapolating from the teams that are included in the other cards in that first group, you can see that the player who's missing is from the Marines.  I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to guess that that was originally supposed to be Roki Sasaki but he had to be pulled from the set since he was heading to MLB.  The first 23 cards were picked by Konami while the last 24 cards were selected from user voting.  As far as I can tell, they are available all over Japan (as opposed to the Hawks cards from last year which were only available in Kyushu).  The cards are already on sale as someone on Reddit had a photo up of some of them.  I also was told by Kenny (Zippy Zappy) that he'd seen them in a convenience store - I assume he was in Tokyo. UPDATE - you can see most of the cards in the set (along with kira parallels) over at Jambalaya.

- Epoch is back with their on-demand Epoch One cards.  Like last year, the 2025 edition of the cards is starting with draft pick cards.  So far, there are 47 cards available featuring the 2024 draft classes (regular phase, no development players) for the Marines, Dragons, Fighters, Lions, Eagles, Swallows, Baystars and Giants.  It would not surprise me to see Epoch add cards for the Hawks and Tigers draft picks as well since they, along with the other eight teams, were the teams that Epoch included in the Epoch One cards last year.  The Buffaloes and Carp would surprise me since Epoch has never done Epoch One cards for Orix and hasn't done them for the Carp since 2019.  The cards are still 500 yen each, as they have been since 2018.

The first three sets of the new year have been announced so let's do a quick overview of them...

- Ichiro Suzuki retired in 2019 but apparently missed the game enough that he founded a club baseball team called "KOBE CHIBEN".  He also passed the qualification examination to be coach high school baseball but the rules of the governing organization for high school baseball do not allow anyone working with professional teams to coach at a high school level.  Since Ichiro is still currently employed by the Mariners as some sort of "special assistant", he's apparently only allowed to do high school coaching over the winter.  I'm not clear on all the details but I think he's been primarily working with the women's team from Chiben Gakuen Wakayama High School.  There appears to be an annual game between KOBE CHIBEN and a women's high school baseball team the past four years.  The first game was played in Kobe but the last three have been played in Tokyo Dome.  The 2024 game featured not only Ichiro but also Hideki Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka on the KOBE roster.  BBM is putting out a box set for this game.  The official name is something like "High School Baseball Girls Selection VS Ichiro selection KOBE CHIBEN Baseball card set [DREAM]" but I think I'll just call it "Dream".  Each box contains 32 cards - a 30 card base set, one insert card (which is a parallel of one of the base set cards) and one "premium" insert card (which could be a foil signature, memorabilia, autographed or autographed memorabilia card - some of which feature one or more of Ichiro, Matsui and Matsuzaka).  The 30 base set cards have cards of the "three legends" and 20 members of the high school team.  The set will be out in early February.  What's interesting about this to me is that this will be Ichiro's first BBM card since 2009.  I had kind of figured that he had an exclusive deal with Epoch but maybe that ended this year.  It'll be interesting to see if he appears in any additional sets for BBM this coming year.

- "Rookie Edition", BBM's annual draft pick set, is back for its 23rd edition.  There's no real changes from the past few years.  The base set contains 135 cards - 122 cards for the 2024 draft picks, twelve "New Face" subset cards and a single "list of draft picks" card to make the number of cards in the set divisible by three.  The draft picks include both the 69 players taken in the regular phase and the 53 players taken in the ikusei (development player) phase who actually signed with their drafting team (Ryo Furukawa, the first development player pick of the Hawks, did not sign).  The twelve first round picks will again have "secret" versions which are short printed photo variations and all the regular phase draftees will have various foil signature parallels.  There are three types of insert cards - "Starting Point" (12 cards), "Close Relationship" (eight cards) and "Rookie Of The Year" (two cards featuring the 2024 Rookies Of The Year Hiromasa Funabasama and Natsuki Takeuchi).  There are autographed cards available for both the established players in the set (or at least the ones in the "Starting Point" insert set) and the draftees although I believe the draftees are only available as exchange cards.  The set will be released in late-February.

- The Eagles are continuing to collaborate with Epoch on their annual team set.  This set is usually sold in packs (or boxes of packs) at the Eagles' ballpark but also tends to be available nation-wide.  I'm assuming this set that's been announced is the 2025 Eagles 1st Version set although the web page does not say that.   The base set will contain 72 cards of active players on the roster including the development players.  It's unclear if the base set will include the 2024 draft class or not but I'd assume it will not include any players who've left the team since the end of the season (Masahiro Tanaka and Eigoro Mogi) or any players who've joined the team since then.  There are silver and gold foil signature parallels of all the base cards.  There are three types of insert cards - "Baseball Mates" (7 cards), "Keep Smiling" (17 cards) and "Uniform Collection" (22 cards) - and three types of autographed cards - "Authentic", "Record Achievers" and "2025 Rookie Autograph".  In addition, there will be memorabilia cards from game used uniforms of Takahiro Norimoto and Hideto Asamura and the ubiquitous Epoch premium GEM insert cards (both "White" and "Black").  The set will be released on March 1st.

Just wanted to do a quick post to mention that Topps put eight more Samurai Japan Topps Now cards up for sale on their website.  Each card is still 1342 yen ($8.72) if you live in Japan but only 1220 yen ($7.92) if you're in the States although you'll have to pay 4000 yen for shipping in that case (I think shipping is free in Japan).  It looks like there's two cards for sale for the game against the US on November 21st, two cards for the game against Venezuela on the 22nd, three cards for the game against Taiwan on the 23rd and, surprisingly, a card for the championship game from the 24th (that Japan lost).  These cards will be available for purchase until January 1st.

This brings the total number of Samurai Japan cards for the Premier 12 team to 22.  I'm still expecting an actual team set to go on sale as well, probably later this month.

I wanted to do a quick post about some recently announced/released sets.  I believe that these are pretty much the last sets to be released in 2024 although there's probably one more coming which I'll mention below.

- BBM's ultra high end multi-sport set "Crown" is back for the third year.  BBM's web page is a little light on details but there's more information at the Trading Card Journal.  Six card boxes for this set will retail for 25,300 yen or about $165.  Each box is guaranteed to contain an autograph.  Every card is serially numbered (although I don't know what the counts are to).  The base set has 48 cards and there are four insert sets - "Velvet" (48 cards), "Jet" (48 cards), "Foil Autographed Card" (24 cards) and "Sparkling (3D)" (12 cards) - along with the autographed cards.  The baseball players in the set include OB players like Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Kimiyasu Kudoh, Alex Ramirez, Kenji Johjima and Kosuke Fukudome and active players like Yu Darvish, Yuki Yanagita, Hayato Sakamoto, Munetaka Murakami and Chusei Mannami.  The set also includes athletes from soccer, basketball, rugby, table tennis, badminton, "athletics", marathon, swimming, skate boarding, fencing, speed skating, figure skating, sumo, boxing and wrestling.  The set will be out in late December.

- As I pretty much expected, Topps' Japanese website is selling Topps Now cards for the Samurai Japan team for the Premier 12.  Seven cards went on sale on Friday (I think) for the first two games of the tournament and another seven went on sale today for the final three games of the opening round.  It looks like the cards will be on sale for a month so the first seven will be available until December 22 and the other seven will be available until Christmas.  I expect there will be additional cards for the Super Round added in the next couple days although it's unlikely there'll be one for the finale (since there really wasn't any highlights in that game for Samurai Japan).  Each card is 1342 yen ($8.72) if you live in Japan but only 1220 yen ($7.92) if you're in the States (since you don't have to pay taxes on it).  Of course, if you're in the States, you have to pay for shipping and that's at least 4000 yen or about $26.  I'm not sure if there's a shipping charge in Japan.  I think that there might have been six cards issued for the warm up games Samurai Japan played against the Czech Republic the weekend before their group in the Premier 12 started but I missed them - they must not have been on sale for very long.  I do expect to see Topps offer a 30-ish card team set for the Premier 12 squad as well before the end of the year.

- Speaking of the Premier 12, there's apparently a card set for the cheerleader/dance squad that appeared between innings in the games in Taiwan.   Jambalaya has a listing for the "CT Amaze & Premier 12 Stars" set.  I don't know any real details about the set other than it appears to have a 70 card base set and a 45 card insert set.  Not sure if it's generally available in Japan or if Jambalaya imported it from Taiwan.

I had pretty much figured that Topps wasn't going to release any more NPB sets this year, given that there wasn't a whole lot of time left for them to do it in.  But I awoke yesterday morning to a couple Tweets from Mint that the Trading Card Journal had just published information on three new Topps NPB sets that would be out in December.  There's no other information out there on the sets yet - not even on Topps' Japanese website (that link is currently redirecting to Topps' US site at least for me although this link seems to work for some reason which is how I know there's no information about the sets there)  - and the details are kind of lacking but I'll go ahead and tell you what I know about them:

- The NPB Chrome set will be released on December 13th.  The base set 216 cards which breaks down to 18 cards per team.  Those 18 cards include the manager and three "rookies" (which are the top three 2023 draft picks).  I'll be curious who they have as the manager of the Lions since Kazuo Matsui stepped down at the end of May but Topps hasn't been really good about making their sets up-to-date.  I am going to assume, though, that like last year's Chrome set, this isn't just an ugly parallel version of the "regular" 2024 Topps NPB set but will have a different checklist and different photos.  There are six types of inserts ("a huge increase" according to the website): "Topps 1959", "Chome All Etch", "Bushido", "Ichiro Majestic Moments", "Base Card Kanji Variation" and "Supercharged".  The "Topps 1959" obviously are cards of active players using the 1959 Topps format.  I assume that "Base Card Kanji Variation" cards are just that - a version of the base card with the player's name in Kanji.  I'm also assuming it's a limited number of cards as opposed to the entire set (in which case it'd be a parallel).  Speaking of parallels, I assume there's the usual plethora of them but the set information doesn't list anything about them.  The big news is that the autographed cards will include active NPB players which is a first for Topps - their previous sets only had autographs for both active and retired players who had played in MLB.  The autographed cards also include autographs for Sadaharu Oh and autographed versions of the "Ichiro Majestic Moments" cards.

- The 206 set is back this year and will be sold in packs this year rather than boxes that were only available on-line.  I don't know how big the base set is but my guess would be 216 cards, just like last year's set.  There are "mini" parallels available but no word on back variations.  The inserts include "Base Cards Image Variations", "Base Cards Comic Book Variations", "Mini Base Cards Image Variation" and "Topps 205".  I'm going to again assume that the "Topps 205" cards are cards that will show current NPB players in the T205 tobacco card design.  There will also be autographed cards featuring both active and "legend" players (although I don't know if "legends" will include retired NPB players who did not play in MLB).  The sample images on the website make it look like this is again a "mugshot" set, at least for the base cards.  The set will be released on December 20th.

- Also being released on December 20th is a first for Topps in Japan - a Stadium Club set.  I've been kind of hoping for something like this since Topps first got am NPB license so I'm looking forward to seeing if they actually get the interesting choices of photos that the MLB version of this set usually has.  The website promises that "The photos in the Stadium Club are excellent!  This work also contains many picturesque photos such as fine plays and fist pumps!" so the expectations are high.  To be fair, one of the few compliments I've had about Topps' NPB products is that they've done a decent job with the photo selection so I'm hoping that trend continues with this.  Once again, the website does not say how big the set is but I'd guess either 180 (15 cards per team) or 216 (18 cards per team).  There's four types of inserts - "Beam Team", "Special Forces", "Power Packed" and "Hanabi" and, again, autographed cards for active NPB players as well as Sadaharu Oh.

While I wouldn't put it past them to sneak out yet another set announcement, it looks like there will be no NPB Bowman set this year.  While it's been a set I've mocked quite a bit, I was kind of looking forward to seeing if they were going to do the "1955 Bowman Anime" inserts like the MLB version had this year.

Time to do a quick listing of the baseball cards sets that have been announced in the last month or so.  I suspect that these will be the last sets for 2024, unless Topps finally decides to put something else out.

- Epoch is releasing another of their ultra high-end active/OB player "Stars & Legends" team sets.  The "Giants Stars & Legends with Memorabilia" set will hit the streets on November 30th.  Boxes of this product retail for 22,000 yen (about $144 and I think contain just four cards - although two of them are likely "special insert cards".  The base set has 57 cards - 16 active and 41 OB players (although those numbers may change) - and there's a serially numbered parallel version of each base set card.  There's Epoch's usual collection of insert cards, five different types of autographed cards and seven different types of memorabilia cards.  All the memorabilia cards appear to be fragments of bats.  I'm not sure who all has autographs in the set - typically the Giants don't allow their active players to have autographed cards and at least one of the OB players (Tetsuharu Kawakami) isn't around to sign anymore.

- The 2024 edition of "Career Achievement", one of Epoch's annual collaborations with the Japan Baseball Promotion Association (aka the OB Club), is schedule for release on December 28.  It's another ultra high-end set with six card boxes retailing for 18,150 yen (~$118) - I think two of the cards are guaranteed to be autographs.  The base set has 56 cards and there's a Hologram parallel of each card.  There's apparently five possible autograph cards - "Authentic" (53 cards), "Tribute To The Past" (24 cards), "Baseball Greats" (14 cards), "Baseball Autographs (White)" (25 cards) and "Baseball Autographs (Black)" (25 cards).  I again can't say for sure who has autographs in the set although it appears that all the players in the set are living.  The biggest names in the checklist are Sadaharu Oh, Ichiro and Hideki Matsui.

- BBM's annual ultra high end set - Glory - will be released in late November.  Boxes of this will retail for 25,300 yen (~$165) and will contain six cards.  The base set will contain 36 cards (three players per team I assume) which all have multiple serially numbered parallels.  There are two serially numbered insert sets - "Miyabi" (36 cards serially numbered /50 with a parallel version) and "Glorious 3D" (12 cards that I assume are serially numbered but I don't know the count).  There are a plethora of autograph and memorabilia cards.  The memorabilia cards include both patch cards and bat knob cards.

I wanted to do a quick post about a new set announcement and some updates about previously announced sets.

- The new set announcement was for Genesis, BBM's annual high end set.  As usual the base set contains 120 cards - ten per team which splits up as nine player cards and a team checklist.  Also as usual, no one really cares about the base set 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 five "High-grade insert card" sets - Elite Of Nine, Game Changer, "Rookie Limited Insert", Cross Earth and Combo Cross Foil Signing.  The set will be released in late September.

- Calbee Series Two was scheduled to be released "in late June" but I haven't seen any evidence that it has come out yet (although there are four more days in the month).  The official announcement on Calbee's website hasn't changed but I've seen two different things saying the set won't be released until late July.  The first was Jambalaya's front page where they list upcoming releases while the second was this tweet I saw this morning.  (On the other hand I saw several other tweets implying the set would be out on the 27th so we'll see what happens.)

- Vol. 2 of the Central and Pacific League Booster Packs for Bushiroad's Dream Order collectible card game will be released this weekend.   I hadn't realized that Bushiroad had put checklists for all Booster Pack set on their website and I was confused for a moment when it listed 228 cards for all of them when I thought that the Vol. 1 sets were more like 108.  Their listings contain all the parallel versions of the cards - for example the Orix Buffaloes checklist for the Vol. 1 set has four separate Tomoya Mori cards listed - all with the same card number - which is why the numbers are so high.  UPDATE - forgot to mention that the website mentions that Vol. 3 of the Booster Packs will be released on August 24th with Vol. 4 scheduled for October 12th.  No checklists for those sets yet though.

It's been about six weeks since the last roundup I did for upcoming releases - long enough that one of these isn't "upcoming" any more but was released last week.  

- The second part of BBM's annual three part flagship set will be out in early August.  As has been pretty standard for the last 10 years, this year's edition of 2nd Version will contain a base set of 300 cards which will break down as 216 "regular" player cards (18 per team), 36 "1st Version Update" cards (3 per team), 12 team checklists and 36 cards (3 per team) making up the second half of the "Cross Earth" cross set subset (with the first half having been in the 1st Version set).  There's also a currently unannounced number of "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards which are likely short-printed and not considered part of the base set.  There are six insert sets - "Star Portraits" (12 cards), "Coming Heroes" (24 cards), "Fireworks" (24 cards), "Treasure" (12 cards), "Foil Picturesque" (12 cards) and "Combo Cross Foil Signing" (13 cards) - I think the last four are all serially numbered but I'm not positive.  The set will also include the usual plethora of facsimile autograph parallels as well as the alternate photo "Secret Versions" of various scarcity.  There are a bunch of autographed cards including an autographed Yoshinobu Tsutsugoh card in the style of the autographed cards in the BBM Baystars team set and autographs of rookies and/or prospects Ryuki Watarai, Kengo Matsumoto, Shinnosuke Hada and Keito Mombetsu.  There's also memorabilia cards of Watarai and other rookies.

- BBM has announced the last two of their annual "comprehensive" team sets - the Carp and the Eagles.  I'm going to split the descriptions of them up because the Eagles set is a departure from BBM's standard team set template.  First the Carp set - it'll have a base set of 81 cards, 70 of which are "regular" player cards for manager Takahiro Arai and the players on the team's 70 man roster.  The other eleven cards are split between three subsets that are not fully defined yet - "Young Players To Watch" (three cards), "Early Game Highlights" (five cards) and "Classmates" (three cards).  There are 18 non-premium insert cards split up into four separate, not quite defined sets - "Core Players" (nine cards), "Up-And-Coming Players" (three cards), "Home-Grown Veterans" (three cards) and "Rookies" (three cards).  There are also two serially numbered insert sets - "Treasure" (24 cards) and "Esperanza" (15 cards).  There will also be autographed cards available.  The set will be out in mid-July.

- The Eagles are celebrating their twentieth season this year and BBM's expanded the base set for their Eagles team set to 117 to commemorate this event.  Essentially it looks like they're doing the standard 81 card team set with 67 "regular" player cards for manager Toshiaki Imae and the 70 man roster players and four not fully defined subsets - "Brightest Hope" (two cards), "Main Pitcher" (five cards), "Main Batter" (five cards) and "Record Makers" (two cards) - and then adding an extra 36 cards to cover the Eagles 20th Anniversary.  There are 18 cards for "Team Alumni", nine "Team Records" cards, six "Rookie Reprint" cards and three "Team History" cards.  There's only the usual 18 non-premium insert cards though, split between "Main Players" (nine cards), "Rookie Players" (three cards), "Rising Tide" (three cards) and "Big Comeback" (three cards) along with the serially numbered sets "Treasure" (24 cards) and "Esperanza" (15 cards).  The "Treasure" cards may include OB as well as active Eagles players (or managers - both Katsuya Nomura and Senichi Hoshino appear on the cards).  The set will be out in late July.

- BBM's making a change to their annual cheerleader/dance squad set this year.  Instead of issuing the "Dancing Heroine" set in two parts - Hana and Mai - BBM is now just issuing a single set.  But fear not, cheerleader fans, as the base set will include around 180 cards which was roughly the size you'd get when you put both of the previous sets together.  As usual the set only includes members of the squads from the Tigers, Giants, Swallows, Dragons, Marines, Hawks, Eagles, Lions and Fighters - 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.  The set will be out in late August.

- Calbee's Series Two set should be hitting the stores any day now.  This is a kind of bittersweet announcement since I was initially excited that Series Two was coming out at its usual time this year after being delayed until August last year.  I was hoping it meant that there'd be a Series Three in September but Sean (who I have to admit was trying to be more optimistic than me about Calbee this year) pointed out that their announcement said that the cards would be on sale through November, long after Series Three should have been released.  So this will probably be the last Calbee set for the year.  Like Series One, Series Two has 60 "regular" player cards (five per team) and six checklist cards.  Instead of the "Title Holder" subset that Series One had, this one has a twelve card "Player's Association President" subset - because what kid doesn't want a card of their favorite team's Union representative.  There's also the usual 24 card "Star" insert set and a 12 card "Opening Pitcher" box set available only through Calbee's Amazon Japan store.

- Epoch announced two more of their "Premier Edition" team sets - the Buffaloes and the Dragons.   The Fighters set will be out on August 3rd and will have 42 cards in its base set - I think two of those are OB players.  The Dragons set will be released on August 10th and also has a base set of 42 cards which includes three OB players (who I think are coaches) and the mascot Doala.  All the base cards have a "holo foil" parallel and both sets have the usual gazillion insert cards that are too numerous to list here.  The Buffaloes set features five different types of player autograph cards - "Authentic", "Star", "Rookie", "Legendary" and "Combo".  The Dragons set has those same five types plus "Dragons Combo Autographs", "Mascot Combo Autographs", "Rookie Combo Autographs" and "1 of 1 Autographs".

- Finally, the latest KBO set from SCC was released last week on June 12th.  I believe they are only being sold at 7-11s in Korea but I don't know that for sure.  The base set contains 140 cards - 13 cards for each of the ten teams in the league plus 10 cards featuring retired players.  There's also a bunch of parallels and autographed cards available.  Dan Skrezyna of Korean Cardboard has put the checklist for the set up at TCDB and he's had a couple Tweets showing examples of the cards.

Topps Japan is now offering Topps Now cards for NPB.  They've got seven cards currently up on their website featuring events from the first couple weeks of the season.  The cards are 1243 yen a piece (about $8) although there are volume discounts if you're buying multiple copies of the same card (although there is no bundle for all seven cards available).  Unlike the MLB version of Topps Now, the NPB cards are on sale for a week.  I guess we'll see if Topps will offer new cards every day or if it'll be a weekly offering (or some other interval).

It appears that Topps will not ship these cards overseas.  I suspect there's something in their NPB license prohibiting them from doing so as they also wouldn't ship the Tigers Championship set overseas but will do so with the Samurai Japan cards.

I'm mildly surprised that Topps appears to have made a little bit of effort on the cards backs.  There's text in both Japanese and English describing what's happening on the card and it's not simply a repeat of the text on the front.  Granted it's not a paragraph like the MLB Topps Now cards have but at least it's not just listing when and where the game happened without even giving the score like the Topps Now Samurai Japan cards have had.

I'm going to be curious which teams they end up doing Topps Now cards for.  There's only four teams represented in the first batch of cards - two Eagles, two Tigers, two Lions and a Dragon.  Will they do cards for more teams?  Will they do cards for teams that Epoch isn't doing Epoch One cards for (which would be the Carp and Buffaloes)?  I'll also be curious to see what events get featured on the cards.  So far, the events on five of the seven Topps Now cards were also featured on Epoch One cards.  Since Epoch is somewhat slow in their rollout of Epoch One cards, it's possible the other two will be represented as well.  

I guess the big question is whether there's a big enough demand for "on demand" NPB cards for both Epoch and Topps to be doing them.  Given that Epoch One cards are only 500 yen, less than half the price of the Topps Now cards and so far are covering the same events, it's hard to see why anyone would want the Topps cards.

via GIPHY

It's been about a month since the last time I did a round up of the new sets coming out, there's been a bunch more announced and I'm going to too busy to post much for the next week or so which means it's probably time for another roundup.  So without further ado...

- The 2024 edition of BBM's annual "Icons" box set will be out in late March and is called "Icons - Generations".  While that name might lead you to believe that the set will feature veterans as well as younger players, you'd be wrong.  The set apparently will only include younger players.  The web page touts Roki Sasaki, Hiroya Miyagi and Yasunobu Okugawa as being in the set along with nine rookies.  Each box contains 37 cards - the complete 36 card base set (three cards per team) and one "special" insert card which could be a "foil print" card, an "EXTREME2024" rookie card, a "Foil Autograph" card or a "Handwritten autograph" card.  There are parallel versions of the "foil print" and "EXTREME2024" cards.  The "Foil Autograph" cards only include the three Giants players since Yomiuri does not allow their players to have authentic autographs in any card sets.

- BBM has announced the first three of their annual "comprehensive" team sets.  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.  The Treasure, Esperanza and Magical inserts are all serially numbered.  (If it's not obvious, the "Regular Cards", "Treasure", "Esperanza" and "Magical" columns are the total number of those type of cards in each set.)  In addition, I think there's a significant subset of the player cards (12 players plus the 2023 draftees) for the Hawks and Tigers which will have parallels with different photos (which are not being referred to as "secret" versions for some reason).