New Release: 2014 BBM Hanshin Tigers

The annual Hanshin Tigers team set came out earlier this month, and it has a ton of subsets. The complete set has 99 cards.

 The base cards are similar to the Marines set I showed yesterday, though a little less boxy. I think the bottom border is a bit smaller overall, and with the Tigers logo and stylized jersey number it looks less rigid. There are 72 player cards, including one card with all three mascots.

 Newcomers is a three-card subset with players who joined the Tigers this year, including foreigner Mauro Gomez.

 Kakefu Children is the next three-card subset. I don't know what Kakefu is supposed to mean - it must reference something to do with the team; kakefu translates as drapes. As in curtains. That might explain the background.

 There are two Most Improved Player cards. Akiyama's ERA dropped considerably in 2013, but 2012 was an off-year for him. He seems to be doing okay so far this year.

 The next ten cards are split into two subsets using the same design, just with different background colors. The first is a four card Tigers' Starters set with a green background, with one card for each of the starting pitchers on the Tigers. Statistics on the back are for the first month of 2014.

 The six card Core of Tigers subset has a red or blue background and has game-by-game statistics through April. I'm not a fan of partial-season stats, mainly because the cards came out over a month after the statistics period ends, which constitutes half of the season to date. But I do like the idea of game-by-game statistics.

The last nine cards in the Tigers set are puzzle subsets titled Tigers In Motion. Three players have three cards each. Side by side, there are three background images and nine smaller images, which serve to show pitching, hitting, or fielding motions for the player pictured.

 I'm aware of two parallels for the Tigers set, both using foil backgrounds. Tigers' Starters, Core of Tigers, and Tigers In Motion are all paralleled. The more common is a silver foil background numbered out of 150, as seen above.

 The gold/yellow foil background is numbered out of 50. I'm not 100% certain of the foil colors, because I haven't seen enough copies to compare different serial numbers for each subset.

 The lone insert set is Tigers Spirit. As always it doesn't have much to it beyond the name and a simple background design.

 This, too, has a parallel. Tigers Spirit can be found with a holographic foil, serial numbered to 200 copies.

Three memorabilia cards are inserted in packs with Seung-Hwan Oh and Matt Murton. Single-player cards have 200 copies each with a patch version numbered to 20 copies. A dual-player card is limited to 20 copies, with a 5-copy patch version. [BBM image]

Every player in the base set has an autograph except for Kazuo Ito, with most players having 60 copies each; a few players have less (minimum of 45) and there are 180 of the mascots (it could be three separate cards with 60 copies each).

Additionally, there are seven single-signed special autographed cards limited to 10 copies and two dual-signed cards limited to five copies each.
Packs have 7 cards each with a suggested retail price of 400 yen; boxes have 20 packs each.