BBM just released another multi-sport set called
Infinity. For those that bought the Masterpiece set last year, Infinity falls right in line with that. This set has mostly baseball players (42) along with a variety of other sports including Curling, Speed Skating, Ice Hockey, Pro Wrestling, Tennis, and Badminton to name a few. Some of the players are still active while others have been retired for a while. Most importantly for this blog are the 5 sumo wrestlers that are included in the base set along with a few sprinkled in insert sets. This is an All-Japanese set so you likely won't find many names that you recognize unless you follow a particular Japanese sport. There are 112 cards in the Base Set along with 4 Insert Sets: a 9-card All the Glory set, a 9-card One and Only set, an 18-card Brilliant Athlete set, and a large autograph set. I believe the Brilliant Athlete set also has foil-stamped facsimile parallels in it. Likewise, the One and Only set has holographic parallels #ed to 50.
I bought two of these boxes off of Rakuten and I am going to rip one here and keep the other one for a rainy day. Packs come 20 per box with 5 cards per pack. Let's keep fingers crossed for some sumo cards!
Pack 1: Pro Wrestler Masakatsu Funaki and Horse Jockey Yutaka take make their debut.
Pack 2: A Baseball Heavy Pack
Pack 3: Boom, my first sumo card....the cropping on this card is a little weird though
Pack 4: An eclectic pack for sure and I snagged a Brilliant Athlete insert...Naoko Takahashi. Awesome to see a female hockey player too.
Pack 5: Another sumo wrestler...Kisenosato. This is a Speed-Skating heavy pack.
Pack 6: Some old school images here and another speed skater.
Pack 7: MMA, Curling, and Baseball all in the same pack! I love this set.
I'll bust another 7 packs and post in the next few days. Until then...enjoy!
I love multi-sport sets... it's one of the reasons I subscribe to SI for Kids. Cool product. Looking forward to seeing what's inside the other 13 packs.
ReplyDeleteI like this set and it gives exposure to some of the smaller sports in Japan.
DeleteNot really into the multi-sport aspect of the set but Infinity has a couple baseball cards I want to get. They are for guys who never played professionally but were pretty famous in amateur ranks. You've got at least two of them - Atsuyoshi Otake and Masanori Sugiura. Sugiura was a legend in the industrial leagues and played on the 2000 Olympic team. The other one is Masatake Yamanaka who is a Hall Of Famer and the All Time Tokyo Big Six victory leader. Sugiura and Yamanaka have each had one card before but I don't think Otake has. It's a nice departure from what otherwise is pretty much the same old faces in the baseball section.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I really was only hoping for a Base Sumo Set so the others cards are less meaningful to me. Great info on the Baseball piece of this set. I would imagine we’ll start seeing sets of these pop up on YJ fairly cheaply here soon.
DeleteAre the sumo guys in the set pretty much the usual suspects or are there some guys who rarely show up in sets?
DeleteHaven't really been looking for complete Infinity sets but Ryan G told me he'd seen complete Masterpiece sets going for 290 yen on an online store called Suruga-ya so it wouldn't surprise me to see them at a comparable price.
All these guys have had sumo cards before over the past 4 years so no real surprises. Onokuni might be the best card from the sumo series. It doesn't surprise me about the 290 yen for Masterpiece. I think a lot of people open these boxes chasing the autographs and numbered cards.
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