2023 Epoch NPB set

The sixth edition of Epoch's flagship card set - called "NPB" - was released about a month ago.  It contains a base set of 444 cards - 432 "regular" player cards and 12 "Legendary Player" ones.  I find this set to be a somewhat of a mixed bag but overall I think it's an improvement on some of their earlier iterations of this set.  Let's dive in.

We'll start with the 432 "regular" player cards.  As has been the case with every edition of this set, the cards are split up evenly between the 12 teams with each one having 36 cards in the set.  These 36 cards include the team's manager as well as the entire 2023 rookie class (which is all the non-ikusei players drafted last fall).  The set includes all the big names that you'd expect - Munetaka Murakami, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Tetsuto Yamada, Kazuma Okamoto and Masahiro Tanaka.  Since the set is 108 cards larger than BBM's 1st Version set, I always find it interesting to see who's in this set who was not in that set.  This year there are 122 players in this set who did not appear in 1st Version.  Three of the players are ones that I called out in my 1st Version post as possibly being left out due the WBC - Ariel Martinez, Raidel Martinez and Wu Nienting.  Other names of interest are Kenta Bright, Yuito Mori, Fumihito Haraguchi, Shota Dohbayashi, T-Okada, Tyler Austin and Hiroyuki Nakajima.  Going the other way, there's 14 guys in 1st Version who aren't in this set and they're nearly all foreign players - Luis Castillo, Adam Walker, Dillon Peters and Brian Keller among others.  What I find very odd is neither set has cards for Hirokazu Sawamura, Marwin Gonzalez or Frank Schwindel.  While I understood them not being in 1st Version as it had the earlier press date, I don't understand why they're not in this set which came out two months later - especially when all three are in their respective BBM team sets that came out earlier than this set.

The previous versions of this set had card designs that were kind of similar to each other in a way (as this post showing the repetitive poses of the cards of Masataka Yoshida shows).  This year they used a completely dissimilar design and I find myself liking it, despite it having two borders around the photo while I usually prefer a borderless design.  

I've beaten up on Epoch for their photo selection over the year probably a little more than I've beaten up on Calbee for the same thing.  I think this year's set shows an improvement although there are still WAY too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting, catchers catching" photos.  Here's one good photo from each team - some teams have many more good photos than others:

#097

#133

#042

#276

#235

#030

#297

#199

#381

#424

#343

#170

But there are still some things that strike me as odd with this set.  First of all, there's a relatively large number of studio photos of players in front of a blank background.  A large number of them are rookies which I could almost excuse (even though BBM had "real" photos of all of the rookies in 1st Version two months ago) but there's a handful of veterans which pretty much doesn't make any sense to me.  Here's three examples:

#279, #189, #389

OK, in fairness, Tyler Austin missed the beginning of the season and the Baystars changed their uniforms this off season so this was the only way they'd have a photo of him in this year's uniform.  

Epoch also repeated what they did last year with having several Swallows players obviously posing on the field of their farm team's ballpark in Toda although instead of it being all rookies like it was last year, it's three rookies and an established, albeit injured, pitcher:

#223, #251, #250, #249

The card backs are pretty much the same as always.  They show the stat lines for the player's last three season in NPB along with their career stats.  There's a cropped version of the photo on the front of the card as opposed to the mug shots that BBM and Calbee typically have on their card backs.  Here's Yoshinobu Yamamoto's card as an example:

#005

This is the fourth time that Epoch has included a 12 card "Legendary Player" subset with this set.  The last two years these cards have been short printed and not considered part of the base set.  However this year they're part of the base set again.  As you can probably guess, 12 cards means there's one OB player per team included.  I'm kind of "meh" about the subset - it's basically an excuse to include some OB players in the autographed cards available with the set.  Three of the players - Seiichi Uchikawa, Hatsuhiko Tsuji and Shinji Sasaoka - were in last year's set (although Tsuji and Sasaoka were managers) and none of them are particularly big names with maybe the exception of Takashi Toritani.  Here's Uchikawa's card:

#440

As I said, the set's kind of mixed bag but I think on the whole, the pros outweigh the cons.  And while it might not be as good a set as 1st Version, it beats the hell out of Topps and probably whatever Calbee eventually produces this year.  You can decide for yourself by checking out all the cards over at Jambalaya.