Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

Want Lists are located here. NPB Baseball Want List is located here.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

New Release: 2014 BBM Dragons

The past couple years, the Yomiuri Giants have been the last team to get their annual regular set from BBM, but for whatever reason, the Dragons set was held back until late August.
 The base cards follow the standard formula, with vertically aligned statistics. I wish BBM would include career stats in team sets, because many of the players don't have cards in 1st Version or 2nd Version. Those flagship cards include career stats for foreign leagues as well. The base set has 90 cards, with 74 regular player cards. All card numbers in the base set have a D prefix.
 The mascot cards have a unique design, serving as a sort of subset of three cards (#75-77).
 There are four cards in the "Fresh Local Stars" set. The kanji characters make no sense, though, translating as "Registered Dragons Gate" or "Climbing Dragons Gate" or something to that point.
 This subset has no English title, but it translates to "Strong Dragons Hitters" so that's what I'll go with. There are three cards here.
 BBM has continued to use puzzle cards in many of its releases. The title of this six-card puzzle is Twin Dragons. The top three cards are of Hector Luna, with Ohshima across the bottom. The players' swing is captured in nine total images to make a three-card horizontal puzzle; the back forms a six-card puzzle of both players.
 I'm only aware of one parallel for the base cards, a foil version serial-numbered to 150. I'm not sure if all of the base cards are paralleled or not.
 Fresh Local Stars also has the 150-copy parallel. I'm guessing the Hitters subset has a parallel, though I haven't seen a copy yet.
 The puzzle is also in the parallel set.
 As always, there's a single nine-card insert set. The kanji here is pretty funny, as the first two characters translate as Kyushu. But the Dragons aren't in Kyushu. Instead, taking each kanji piece by piece shows that this is "Nine Large Dragon Kings" - an odd name for an insert set. These have a KR prefix before their card numbers, essentially highlighting the Japanese words for "Nine Dragons". The inserts have foil backgrounds with blue foil highlights.
 I know of two parallels for the insert set. The green foil parallel is serial-numbered to 150 copies.
The gold foil parallel is serial-numbered to 50 copies.
There are 50 autograph subjects randomly inserted in packs, with print runs ranging from 49-60 copies each. There are also 8 players who have vertical autographs serial numbered to 10 copies each.

No comments:

Post a Comment