2017 BBM Fighters Girl & B☆B Family Box Set

BBM's annual cheerleading set, Dancing Heroine, has been a proven success. After a single set in 2011, the pack-based issue has been split into two releases. And for the past few years, that has included a box set focused on one specific cheerleading team.

At the same time, mascots are huge here, and cards featuring teams' characters are found in BBM's team sets and flagship sets every year. In 2011, BBM issued a box set with cards only of mascots, with an expanded packed-out set in 2013.

 With this year's team cheerleading set, BBM decided to bump the set size by tossing in the mascots. One box set contains a full 58-card base set and two special cards, with a suggested price of 5000 yen. A total of 2000 sets were produced.

 The cheerleaders each get two cards in the base set. The first 24 cards feature each Fighters Girl in their standard costume. Backs have pictures in a secondary costume.

 There is one group photo.

 The next five cards feature the team's five mascots. These are on colorful backgrounds.

 The cheerleaders are back in "plain clothes" casual shots for the next 24 cards.

And the final four cards are given to the mascots again, this time showing them "in action" on the field. The last of these four cards has two characters together.

 The two promised hits are going to be autographs. Each Fighters Girl and the five mascots signed 100 single autographed cards. That makes 2900 autographs right there - about half of the boxes have two single-signed autographs.

Each cheerleader also appears in one dual-signed card with another Girl, making the dual-signature checklist 12 cards long. These have a print run of 45 cards each. Additionally, there are two mascot multi-signature cards; one with three signatures and the other with two. Those two cards are serial-numbered to 40 each. A total of 620 multi-signature cards were printed.

The remaining 480 "special" cards are chekis - the Japanese term for an instant Polaroid-style photo. Each Fighters Girl has 13 "solo" chekis, and there are 12 pairings with 14 chekis each. It looks like each cheki is a 1-of-1, with customized messages written on the photo.

It looks like you have a pretty good shot of getting a dual autographed card or a cheki - over half the boxes have one of these two "better" hits. Granted, the chekis are the most valuable. But then again, when it comes to all of these cheerleader sets, the only thing making any one particular autograph or other card more valuable is how pretty the girl is. That is, unless one goes on to be a successful singer or actor or other celebrity.