New Release: 2014 BBM Hawks

Coming out in late March, at the same time as the Swallows team set, the 2014 Hawks set may be the brightest team set this year.

 The base set uses white borders with the Hawks gold color in a couple design elements. The players' photos jump out of the background photos, and are on top of the borders. Backs are yellow-gold and follow the usual BBM layout. Cards in this release have [HAWKS] on the copyright line.

The 90-card base set has no parallels or subsets - it's less for me to need to buy for my type collection, but it provides less "higher value" cards per box (as serial-numbered parallels) at a time when the price per card is going up. Each 7-card pack has a suggested retail price of 400 yen.

The lone insert set, with nine cards, is called "Trust Yourself!" and uses some kind of glow-light time lapse photo style background on the front with a foil finish. The backs have a brown-tinted copy of the front photo with the usual basic biographical stats on the card. It's entirely possible that serial-numbered parallels of this set exists, but like the base set I haven't seen anything yet.

I just got my autograph and relic cards from the set but I haven't had a chance to scan them yet. There are a ton of autographs in packs - I count 87 signers of the 89 base set subjects (the mascot has an autograph as well). Cards have between 30 and 90 copies each.

Seven players have a special autograph card, limited to 10 copies each. I haven't seen these yet to really know what they are, and their description on BBM's site doesn't really help.

The three memorabilia cards come in regular and patch versions:

• HM1 Seiichi Uchikawa (visitors jersey) 200 copies, 25-copy patch version
• HM2 Yuya Hasegawa (home jersey) 200 copies, 25-copy patch version
• HM3 Uchikawa/Hasegawa Dual Jersey Combo 25 copies, 5-copy patch version