Sunday, February 24, 2019

Over The Top

Epoch has carved out a niche for itself over the past few years with what I've referred to as "ultra-high end" sets.  Boxes of these sets typically contain four to six cards and retail for over 10,000 yen, although they generally are guaranteed to include at least one autographed card.  Yesterday, however, Epoch released a set that can only be described as "stratospheric-high end".

"One & Only" is a set completely dedicated to Shohei Ohtani.  Each box retails for 129,600 yen (roughly $1170) and contains four cards.  Each box contains one or two regular cards, a parallel card (if there's only one regular card), a memorabilia card and an autographed card.  The base set contains 25 cards, each of which is serially numbered to 11.  There are three types of parallels - "Gold" (numbered to 5), "Black Parallel - Silver" (numbered to 3) and "Black Parallel - Gold" (1 of 1).  The memorabilia cards include jersey, letter, "big patch" and combination varieties.  These are all serially numbered to no more than 11 - some of the varieties are 1 of 1.  There's about 12 versions of the autograph cards - all of which seem to be limited to no more than 5, including some 1 of 1 cards.  There's also cards that are both memorabilia and autograph cards - these are limited to no more than three each with a couple varieties being 1 of 1.  A couple versions of the memorabilia & autograph cards are booklets - someone was selling one of these on Yahoo! Japan Auctions with a starting price of one million yen (roughly $9037) (although it didn't sell).  This search on Yahoo! Japan Auctions will show you what some of these cards look like - it's the only way I'll see them because this is certainly way out of my price range.

Just to be clear - Ohtani is depicted as Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighter on all these cards - there are no Angel jerseys or photos in the set.

Generally I'm not a big collector of memorabilia and autographed cards but I do understand the attraction of them.  This seems a bit much though but to each his own.

3 comments:

SumoMenkoMan said...

Wow, pretty amazing the market that he still has to able to satisfy over in Japan. I really hope he has a great year this year, even if he doesn't pitch.

Zippy Zappy said...

I knew a few collectors on Japan who took a shot on this ultra high-end set. I've seen some 1/1 and jumbo patches pulled as a result. Although apparently because the color of the ink is sometimes gold they tend to smudge, which... lol.
Then again EPOCH's whole appeal is that they're the company that makes on-card autographs. Which matters when all BBM releases is sticker autographs. At least according to pretty much every collector I've spoken to over there.

Fuji said...

Looks like Epoch is following in Topps' footsteps.