New Release: 2017 Calbee Series 1

The first installment of Calbee's annual baseball card set hit grocery shelves last month, but with the 30-Day challenge and everything else going on I kind of neglected to post about the set until now. That's partly because I didn't even find it on shelves until about a week ago. However, I got my type collection singles and set before then!

 The base cards look essentially the same as usual. NPB Card Guy pointed out that the names are in white again after using black text in 2015 and Japanese characters last year. Not having to read kanji and hiragana/katakana makes it much faster for me to flip through cards. But otherwise, the design remains the same as it has been for some time now. There are 72 cards in the regular set.

 The Title Holder insert uses the Japanese name for the awards, which is kind of different. 23 cards are found in this non-premium insert set.

 I'm not sure why, but checklist cards always carry a premium despite not being short-printed. I went with the Carp's Central League Championship ceremony shot for my type collection. There are four cards in this set.

 As for premium inserts, Starcard is back. As usual, there are 24 cards in the set as well as a parallel foil signature version.

Legend highlights six players this year who retired, including their full career stats on the back. There's a foil signature parallel of this set too.

The premium special box card set for 2017 Series 1 is Clutch Hitters. I don't have my type card yet for this set. The cards appear the same as most of Calbee's Special Box sets - the set's title runs vertically up one side in silver foil, and the cards are printed on foilboard similar to BBM's insert cards.

New Release: 2017 BBM Hiroshima Carp Premium

The Premium series from BBM seems to setting up as a formulaic release. The Carp set is limited to 1200 copies, with the same design as the Fighters cards. The only difference is the color scheme. Each box contains 27 cards plus two special cards. Retail price is 10,000 yen, and boxes hit the shelves at the end of April. Note that I haven't found any singles for my collection yet, so all the images in this post are from BBM.

Base cards are red, but similar to the Fighters set.

Takahiro Arai has an MVP card in the SP set - there are six cards in total including five Best Nine winners (Arai, thus, appears twice in this insert set). All six cards are numbered to 200 copies each, and one card comes in each box.

Finally, autographs for over 60 players are included one per box. Like the Fighters set, they are numbered to 10 or 20 copies each.

New Release: 2017 BBM Chiba Lotte Marines

Coming out in late April, the 2017 Marines set is sold 6 cards per pack for 400 yen, and 20-pack boxes are 8000 yen. BBM has standardized the base set size at 81 cards for team sets so far.

 Base cards for the Marines set have white borders; BBM tends to use white with the Marines to match their team colors.

The Seawall Quartet subset has four players, unsurprisingly. Backs have team-by-team performance.

 2017 New Wave features three new players. The design reminds me of Fleer's Wave of the Future inserts.

 Finally, Award Winners have four players who led the league in various categories or won awards such as Gold Gloves.

The Marines release thankfully has only three insert sets. Each set has parallels numbered to 90, 60, and 30 copies.

 Next Sensation: 6 cards

 Brand New Face: 3 cards

Prime Choice: 9 cards

Additionally, the Marines version of the Phantom insert set has six cards.

As usual, every player has an autographed card serially-numbered up to 60 copies each. Two combo signature cards were issued with 5 copies each.

Silver Autographs are numbered to 5 or 10 copies each with a 1/1 parallel. There are 9 cards in this set.

The seven Rookie Autographs have 5 or 10 copies each, and the Cross Squall autograph set has three cards numbered to 10 copies each.