2020 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars set

Epoch's first "Rookies & Stars" team set for 2020 was for the Saitama Seibu Lions and it came out a couple weeks ago.  The base set for the set contained only 36 cards, just a tad more than half the size of last year's 68 card set.  The reason for the contraction in size is that last year's set was a "comprehensive" team set in that it included cards for all the players on the Lions' 70 man roster.  This set only has cards for 34 players plus manager Hatsuhiko Tsuji and farm team manager Kazuo Matsui.

The set contains all the big name players for the Lions that you'd expect to see - Tomoya Mori, Takeya Nakamura, Hotoka Yamakawa, Takumi Kuriyama, Sosuke Genda and Shuto Tonosaki.  All the 2019 draft picks are also included (of course).  I thought it was interesting to compare the 36 people in this set with the 27 Lions that BBM included in their 1st Version base set.  Surprisingly BBM actually had two players that this set doesn't have - Reed Garrett and Fumikazu Kimura.  If you do the math that mean that this set has 11 Lions not in BBM's 1st Version set - Keisuke Honda, Ernesto Mejia, Ryusei Satoh (who is in BBM's "New Age Stars" insert set), Shohei Suzuki, Kaima Taira, Wataru Takagi, Aito Takeda, Tetsuya Utsumi, Haruka Yamada, Kakeru Yamamnobe and the afore-mentioned Kazuo Matsui.

I've been encouraged this year that both Calbee and BBM have appeared to have improved their photo selection process this year and gotten away from the same boring poses.  Sadly, Epoch apparently has not gotten the memo.  Almost all the cards in this set fall into the "batters batting, pitchers pitching" category.  There's basically one photo of a base runner (Ryota Kawano) and one photo of someone fielding (Yamada).  Here's some examples:

#08

#27

#32

#29

#02

One other exception is for Daisuke Matsuzaka.  For some reason Epoch thought it would be best to use a photo from his press conference when he rejoined the Lions:

#07

Here's what the card backs look like:

#21 (Hotaka Yamakawa)

The cards feel like they're from a thicker stock than normal so they have a nice heft to them.  I can't say I'm all that impressed with the set as a whole though. 

If you want to look at the entire set (along with inserts and parallels), take a look over at Jambalaya (as usual).