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.

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.

Last week while I was working on a post about several packages I had recently received, I started having a conversation with Jason, the source of one of those packages.  He'd gotten some more 2024 Genesis cards in and had picked up the one remaining player card I wanted from the set - Junichiro Kishi, who like six other players, was in Genesis but not BBM's 1st or 2nd Version set.  Jason also had several jersey cards available and I decided to get one of them as well.  

Now, I feel like it's too much effort for Jason to ship me just two cards so we started having a discussion about what else he had that I'd be interested.  I started asking him about "Secret Versions" - BBM's short printed photo variants - from this year's 2nd Version set.  It turned out he had a couple.  Then he checked 1st Version and discovered he had a couple from that set as well.  It kind of snowballed after a while and ultimately I ended up getting fourteen of these cards from the past four years.  I received the package today and I thought I'd do a quick post showing off what all he sent me.

The first card isn't actually a "Secret Version" - it's an "Ultra Secret Version".  As the name implies, these are even more short printed than the "Secret Versions" (although I don't know how rare either one is).  Since I had not gotten any of the "Ultra Secret Versions", I was happy to get this one:

2021 BBM 1st Version #066 (USV)

I still do not have any of the even rarer "Super Ultra Secret Versions".

Here are the remaining "Secrets" he sent me:

2021 BBM 1st Version #041 (SV)

2021 BBM 1st Version #014 (SV)

2021 BBM 1st Version #282 (SV)

2022 BBM 1st Version #230 (SV)

2022 BBM 1st Version #067 (SV)

2023 BBM 1st Version #309 (SV)

2023 BBM 2nd Version #429 (SV)

2024 BBM 1st Version #225 (SV)

2024 BBM 1st Version #299 (SV)

2024 BBM 2nd Version #491 (SV)

2024 BBM 2nd Version #472 (SV)

2024 BBM 2nd Version #367 (SV)

2024 BBM 2nd Version #347 (SV)

Here's the two cards from the Genesis set I also bought from him:

2024 BBM Genesis #099

It wouldn't be a package from Jason without a handful of surprises.  He included a couple numbered parallels from the 2021 Epoch Swallows Stars & Legends set and the 2023 Topps 206 set:

2021 Epoch Swallows Stars & Legends #40

2023 Topps 206 #154

He also included a couple signature parallels from the 2020 BBM 2nd Version set:

2020 BBM 2nd Version #366

2020 BBM 2nd Version #539

2023 BBM Swallows #S04

2023 BBM Swallows #S28

2023 BBM Swallows #S50

I've gotten a couple packages of cards in the mail over the last week or so and I thought I'd do a quick post about what I've received.

First up was a surprise package from Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy.  I had thought with his recent move to Japan that my days of being on the receiving end of his generosity were at an end but an envelope from overseas showed up at my house last Thursday with five baseball cards in it:

2024 Calbee Series Two #094 (Soichiro Yamazaki)

2024 Calbee Series Two #119 (Koki Kitayama)

2024 Calbee Series Two #C-12 (Chusei Mannami)

2024 Calbee Series Two #S-28

2024 Bandai "Pro Baseball Deforme" #BDC1-M03

I was kind of excited about that last card as I hadn't gotten any of these yet.  The cards were given away with bags of what's basically a bar snack called kaki no tane.  Typically they are a mix of soy crackers and peanuts although these packages apparently don't include peanuts.  I have never tried these myself but Sean wrote a post about how gross he thinks they are.  Kenny, on the other hand, told me that he's been eating the chips since he was a kid and really likes them.  He actually bought the bag for the chips, not the card.

Ryan has picked up a couple of these cards for me and has hinted that he might send me a bag of chips as well so perhaps I'll get a chance to try them for myself.

The second package was some stuff I ordered from COMC:

1974/75 Calbee #569 (Yukitsuru Matsumoto)

1975/76/77 Calbee #364 (Yutaka Enatsu)

2019 BBM Infinity #03

2018 BBM Fighters #M2

2021 Epoch Dragons Rookies & Stars #SA-01

Usually Epoch's autographs are on-card ones but the Rosario one is a sticker.

I've already talked about some of the cards I got from Jason but there was a lot more in that package.  I knew I was getting this jersey card of Yuki Nomura from the 2024 BBM Genesis set:

But I didn't know he was going to throw in a couple serially numbered parallels of "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards from this year's BBM 2nd Version set:

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP03

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP13

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP17

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP28

Jason had told me he had some KBO cards he wanted to send me but he didn't tell me how many.  There were five from the 2019 SCC Premium Collection 2 set, 35-ish from the 2021 SCC Rainbow set and 30-ish from the 2022 SCC Rainbow set.  I didn't have maybe one card from any of those sets so they were all new to me.  I'll just show a couple cards from each set:

2019 SCC Premium Collection 2 #SCCP2-19/016

2019 SCC Premium Collection 2 #SCCP2-19/250

2021 SCC Rainbow #SCC-21/E-19 (Lin Jong-chan)

2021 SCC Rainbow #SCC-21/S13

2021 SCC Rainbow #SCC-21/H-17

2022 SCC Rainbow #SCC-21/W10 (Lee Sang-woo)

2022 SCC Rainbow #SCC-21/L04 (Lee Jae-ik)

Last but certainly not least, I got the latest NPB card printed up by Gio of When Topps Had Balls - a 1973 Topps style Sadaharu Oh card:

Thank you Kenny, Jason and Gio!

I did a post earlier this year about "bonus players in BBM's high end sets" - i.e. players who appeared in BBM's "high end" sets (Diamond Heroes, Touch The Game & Genesis) who didn't appear in BBM's "flagship" sets from the same year (or appeared with a different team).  When this year's Genesis set was released a few weeks ago, I took a look at the checklist and found seven players who were not in this year's 1st or 2nd Version sets:

This is by far the largest number of non-flagship players in a Genesis set ever and the most of any of the sets since the 2002 Touch The Game set (which also had seven).  I will caveat this by mentioning that there is a pretty good chance that some of these players will end up in the "1st Version Update" subset of this year's Fusion set when it comes out next month.  In fact, I'd be pretty surprised if Mizutani isn't in that set - I was actually surprised he wasn't in 2nd Version when it came out in August.  If Hernandez hadn't suffered a season-ending injury in August, I'd have expected to see in Fusion as well but I'm less sure of it now.  So the number may drop in another month.

My friend Jason has been selling cards from the set on Ebay so I was able to pick up six of the seven cards from him (and he's expecting to get some more boxes in so he's keeping an eye out for the one I still need):

2024 BBM Genesis #016

2024 BBM Genesis #036

2024 BBM Genesis #037

2024 BBM Genesis #056

2024 BBM Genesis #060

2024 BBM Genesis #107

I should mention that Keisuke Sato was drafted as an ikusei player last October and was promoted onto the Carp's 70 man roster in June which is why he gets the "rookie" icon on his card,