Tuesday, February 25, 2014

That's More Like It

Details (including a checklist) for the first Calbee set of the year were announced this past week.  There will be 84 "regular" player cards (7 per team) in the First Series, along with a whopping five subsets.  The subsets are all four or less cards but still - five subsets!  Calbee appears to be attempting to make up for BBM's slack in not commemorating the Eagles championship - there's two cards for the League Champions (the Eagles and the Giants), four cards for the Climax Series and three cards for the Series itself.  There's also a three card subset for "Legend Retirement Players" Tomonori Maeda, Shinya Miyamoto and Shinjiro Hiyama - I don't know if these will feature reprints of their earlier Calbee cards although historically they have not.  There is also the ubiquitous four checklist cards - this year it appears that Calbee has resumed featuring highlights on these as Wladimir Balentein, Shohei Ohtani and Norihiro Nakaura are all included.

It also looks like Calbee has addressed one of my complaints from last year and is featuring players who switched teams in the off season (Hirokazu Ibata for one) and rookies (Yuki Matsui) in the set.

As usual, there's a 24 card "Star" insert set featuring two players per team.  There is also a "Title Holders" box set that is being made available as some sort of online purchase.  Oddly enough, this subset includes Masahiro Tanaka who obviously will not play in Japan in 2014 but not Estaban German, who will.  German lead the Pacific League in OBP in 2013 while playing for the Lions but joined Orix in the off season and apparently Calbee did not get a picture of him with his new team in time.

There are also two special "lucky" card winners that (I think) feature last year's Rookie Of The Year winners - Takahiro Norimoto and Yasuhiro Ogawa (who both appear in the Title Holder box set as well).  Not sure how you win one of them.

According to Niki's page about the set it will be released March 24th.

1 comment:

Sean said...

Great, less than a month to go for another year of Calbees! It is interesting that they have gone with a lot of subsets, but with a small number of cards in each this year. I would kind of prefer it the other way - one or two big subsets like last year's Title Holders. Still though, I will be camping outside my local convenience store on March 24th!!