2023 BBM Women’s Pro Wrestling Ambitious!!

In addition to the regular Japanese women's wrestling card set that BBM produces each year, they've also occasionally released a special set titles Ambitious!! as a kind of preview or bonus for the year. The first one was in 2020, and they did it again in 2023. I was able to get one box of the cards through my connection with the owner of the Joshi City website. He has also helpfully translated the checklist and explained it in a profile on his site.

The back of the box features a checklist. The numbering skips around 133 cards, suggesting that maybe this set will bookend the regular release this year? That's my guess, anyway. This comes in a boxed set format rather than random packs, so you get a full base set of 47 cards and an additional 8 cards randomized from the inserts, image variations, autographs, and acrylic cards.

The bulk of the base set is made up of I guess what you'd call veteran or star cards, wrestlers who are active and have been around for a while. They get a portrait on front, a zoomed-out photo on the back, and a gold foil faux signature. There is a parallel set of these cards with a pink foil signature numbered to /50. There are 24 cards in the subset. I chose Kairi and Ram Kaicho to represent this block of cards.

Next in the checklist are 5 tag team cards. I chose Up Up Girls - Miu Watanabe, Shino Suzuki, Raku, and Hikari Noa - and Kyoraku Kyomei - Hyper Misao and Shoko Nakajima - to represent the tag teams. You can see that they follow a similar format as the veteran cards, although without the gold foil signatures.

Following the tag teams are a quartet of Legend cards. Shown here are Megumi Kudo and the Villainous Alliance tag team of Dump Matsumoto and Crane Yu.

After a long gap in numbers, the final 14 cards in the set feature rookies. They have a Rookie designator on the front and are formatted like the regular BBM wrestling sets, with a dual photo on front and an action photo on the back. Shown here are ZONES and Honoka.

A handful of wrestlers in the base set have SP cards, which are basically image variations of the base card. The one I pulled was Yuki Arai, one of the wrestlers featured on the front of the box. There are also some super rare foil variations of a couple of wrestlers.

One of the inserts in the set is a foil card. There are 17 of these in the set. I pulled Tomoka Inaba and Hikaru Shida in my box. At just a couple per box it would take quite an effort to put the set together.

These foil inserts also have parallel versions numbered to /40 and to /20. I pulled an /40 version of Sareee's insert card, which is distinguished from the regular foil cards by some chrome etching in the border. I didn't pull an /20 version, but I believe those ones add a splash of color to the border.

I think most boxes contain 2 base autographs. You may get lucky and pull a third autograph if you get a cheki (small Polaroid-style photo) or an insert autograph. My box was a lucky one and contained a Yuki Kamifuku base autograph, and a quad autograph of the Up Up Girls. I've been gathering cards of one of the Up Up Girls, Miu Watanabe, for my collection, but had passed on this quad autograph as it was too expensive. Luckily I pulled one for myself anyway. The base autographs are numbered /100.

I pulled an insert autograph of Hikaru Shida from my box, which is a lucky pull indeed. This card would probably just about pay for the box if I were the type to sell my cards. This one is numbered /60. 

There are a few other types of autograph available in the product, with varying levels of rarity. They mostly line up with the variations in the base and insert checklists, and all are more scarce than the /100 base autographs.

The final card in the box belongs to an acrylic insert set. These thick plastic cards come from a set of 9, and it seems you get one per box. The feature a portrait foreground, an action background, and a colored facsimile signature. I pulled Riho's card from my box.

That's a quick summary of the 2023 BBM Women's Pro Wrestling Ambitious!! product. It's pretty much sold out, but you can find boxes on eBay and plenty of singles if you're proficient with the Yahoo! Auctions service through Buyee's third-party buying site. I've got a handful of cards coming to me through Buyee as we speak, but it'll be a bit before I get them in-hand. I was pretty happy to get a box of this for my collection, and even happier to get some very good pulls from the box I got. It's also nice to have the base set for my comprehensive collection. I think I have every base set from BBM's women's wrestling set going back to 2003 in my collection. I'd hate for the streak to end because of a sold-out product.