Review: 2014 Frontier Chiba Lotte Marines Mizuno

Spend enough time in Japan (a day, if you're observant enough) and you'll random Xs. What does that mean? It's a cross-promotion. So at the gift shop, you might find Hello Kitty dressed up as One Piece characters. Check the package, and you should see "Hello Kitty x One Piece" somewhere.

Frontier issued two team box sets late last year showing collaborations between Mizuno and the Hiroshima Carp and the Chiba Lotte Marines.

Like the Carp set, a fancy black crown design at the bottom of the front has the player's jersey number, position, and name. The team and Mizuno logos appear on the photo on both the front and back. The back photo has a small box around a particular piece of Mizuno sporting goods the player is wearing or using.

There are 15 cards in the base set, and some players can have multiple cards if they provided multiple pieces of equipment. Each box came with two special cards, which could be from any of the options below. Boxes included either one relic and one autograph, or two relics.

• Rookie autograph (one card with base design, #16): black ink 29 copies, red ink 10 copies
• Authentic Signatures
• two types; yellow background (6 players) and grey background (7 players)
• each type has black ink signatures (30-35 copies) and red ink signatures (10-15 copies)
• Game Used Equipment
• Level 1 (undershirt): 4 players, 125 copies each
• Level 2 (signed undershirt): 4 players, 3-5 copies each
• Level 2 (signed spikes): 3 players, 2 copies each
• Bats: 2 players, 35 copies each
• Signed Bats: 2 players, 5 copies each

I bought a full Carp base set because I like the concept of highlighting something different (the equipment in this case). Also, the design of the regular cards isn't ugly. I have not yet picked up a Marines set, though I might eventually. Unfortunately, this is one in a long line of "high end" products which is flooding the market with hits. Hopefully things don't get too out of hand like has happened in the US.