KBO: 2016-17 SMG Ntreev Super Star Baseball Cards Black

The 2016-17 SMG Ntreev Superstar Black Edition would end up being Ntreev's last KBO product. Released at the end of the year, this third Christmastime set marked the company's end of their licensing agreement with KBO, and thus the end of KBO cards for at least a year. (There were some team sets in 2017.) There is talk of a new set coming out in 2018, so hopefully there will be more to write about soon.

In fact, SMG didn't really release a regular set in 2016, as they had in 2014 and 2015. In those years, they had a flagship set of sorts separated into series which they called Seasons, as well as releasing additional sets.

In 2016, there were no "Season" sets, instead going with two "Baseball's Best Players" sets primarily geared toward trading card gamers. These were numbered following the first version, with PA02 and PA03 prefixes identifying the series. Other than the card numbering, they are basically the same as the first series.

The set has a tiny normal checklist and a ton of special cards, so let's break it down.

 The first part of the set (#1-18) are again Superstar (SS) cards. These have a horizontal format, like the prior year, and serial numbering, also like the 2015-16 set. These also again feature record breakers, as well as a KBO card and a few team cards. Serial numbering varies from 50 to 185, with a majority of cards #/185.

 Next are the All-Star (AS) cards, #19-63. These have foil backgrounds and feature league leaders in a variety of categories.

 Just like last year, there are two parallels. This is the Square parallel, with a holographic-ish background. There are also Wave parallels, similar to last year, with the wavy glass block tile background.

 This is a Normal card (#64-113) - only 50 of these are in the set. There is a gold parallel for this subset, as before.

 And here is a Gold Normal parallel. As you can see, the color of the inside border changes, and that appears to be all.

If you're going after a regular set with all the short prints, you can stop here - the remainder of the checklist are hits:

Cards 114-133 are single-swatch relic cards, with an SP suffix. There should be two cards per team. And continuing on, #134-143 are SD-suffix dual-swatch relic cards. These feature two players from the same team. All of the single and dual swatch relic cards appear to be numbered to 40.

The bulk of the remainder of the set (144-357) is comprised of autographed cards. That means there many more autographed cards (214) than regular cards (113, including short prints). Autographs appear to be all numbered to 10 copies each.

If you're going for a full master set, the last 14 cards (#358-371, with SC prefix) are gold foil signature cards. These appear to focus on awards. The one example I saw is for a Gold Glove winner, numbered out of 10, making it as rare as a regular autographed card.

I have to wonder if SMG had more stock somewhere of autographs or memorabilia from unreleased sets, and what they did with it, or plan to do with it. I'm not a big fan of the numbering format of this set, though I suppose it does make some sense to just number the entire release sequentially instead of individually by subset.

For completists, it does bring a bit of a conundrum - do you get just the Normal cards? Add in the All-Stars? Go after the Superstars? Do you try to chase down 228 cards of which there are less than a dozen copies each?

It's a shame that SMG isn't making baseball cards any more, but those past three years were a great part of Korean baseball card collecting history (if there is such a thing)!