New Release: 2014 BBM Genesis

BBM's 2014 edition of Genesis hit shelves at the end of September, and it's exactly what you'd expect from their lone premium release.

 The base set tops out at 108 cards, with 9 cards per team. This is the only pack-based set that BBM uses gold foil on their base cards, and it's a nice touch to the border design. The cards are pretty thick, as usual.

 Even thicker are the checklists, which must serve as dummy cards in packs that don't have hits. Each team has a checklist, and it looks like it's a complete list, including all the insert and hit sets in addition to the base set. These are wasted cards, though, as with Touch the Game BBM used some great photos on the fronts. Now it's boring grey cardboard. There are 12 of these, one for each team.

 Three parallel sets are randomly inserted. Green parallels are numbered to 150.

Red parallels are numbered to 50. I don't have a blue parallel yet, but those are numbered to 25.

Three super-limited inserts are also randomly tossed into packs. Cosmic Cross is a cross-brand set, and have some premium design improvements and are #/50 in Genesis. The other two inserts are Elite of Nine and 3D Royale, though I don't know about serial numbering for those sets. Genesis' inserts are usually the best-looking as far as print quality every year, but are tough to get at a decent price.

People usually don't buy Genesis for anything but the hits, and there are plenty to choose from.

The easiest pulls seem to be the memorabilia cards; 17 players each have cards, and they are numbered to 300. Twenty four players are in the "Big Patch" memorabilia set, which are numbered out of 15 or 20. Finally, 36 players have "Super Patch" memorabilia cards, numbered between 1 and 7 copies each.

Nine rookies have memorabilia cards (#/200), they all have Super Patch versions numbered between 4 and 7 copies.

Dual memorabilia cards for six players are numbered out of 10, with #/5 patch parallels.

Ball cards this year are either signed or contain logos. Two players from each team have logo cards, numbered between 3 and 15 copies each. Three players from each team have autographed ball cards, except the Lions, which has only one player; these are numbered between 10 and 20 copies each.

 Art of Auto was previewed by BBM but doesn't appear on their checklist as such. They mention a "cross brand" autographed set, but I haven't seen any Cosmic Cross signatures. The cross brand autographs are numbered between 5 and 30 cards, and there are 26 subjects.

Rounding out the hits, six players have autographed memorabilia cards, all numbered to five copies each.