2020 Epoch NPB set

For the third year in a row Epoch has issued a "flagship" set called "NPB".  The set came out towards the end of May but I just received it last week.  I had purchased the set when it came out through Noppin, the proxy company I usually use to bid on Yahoo! Japan Auctions, but since shipping from Japan is a bit of a cluster---- right now I waited until I had picked up a Calbee Series Two set as well to save a little bit of money by shipping both sets together.

The previous two editions of the set each had 432 cards but this year the set has grown to 444 cards.  Once again though there are 432 "regular" player (and manager) cards in the set - the additional 12 cards are a subset called "Legendary Player" the features OB players.  The 432 "regular" cards are split evenly among the 12 teams (36 cards per team) and the 12 "Legendary Player" cards are also split evenly among the 12 teams (1 card per team).

Every year I've compared the players who appear in this set with the players who appear in BBM's 1st Version set and I'm always surprised at who is in one set but not the other.  There are 140 players who appear in the NPB set but not 1st Version which is the most in the three year history of the set.  This includes fan favorites but failed prospects like Louis Okoye, Yuki Saitoh and Shintaro Fujinami along with other players like Kenshi Sugiya, Daisuke Yamai, Atsushi Nohmi and Kazuki Tanaka.  There's a handful of Westerners - Spencer Patton, Ernesto Mejia, Alan Busenitz, Raidel Martinez and Livan Moinelo - along with someone I was surprised wasn't in 1st Version - T-Okada (although I had not previously noticed this).  There are 32 players in 1st Version who do not appear in this set.  The bulk of these (28 of them) are Westerners, especially ones who are in their first season in Japan like Tyler Austin, Gerardo Parra, Alcides Escobar, Jerry Sands, Matt Moore and Cory Spangenberg or who switched teams over the winter like Frank Herrman and Stefen Romero.  That's not to say there are no foreign players in the first year in Japan in the set - it does have Justin Bour and Adam Jones in it. 

Like BBM's 1st Version set the set also includes all 12 managers plus all the non-ikusei 2019 draft picks for each team.

I really like the design of this set.  I prefer borderless fronts on my baseball cards and for the first time Epoch has done a borderless design for this set (after two years of white borders).  My main gripe with the set is that Epoch still really hasn't broken away much from the "batters batting, pitchers pitching, catchers catching" monotony of photographic poses - at least not as much as BBM did in the 1st Version set this year.  Still there's a handful of at least slightly more interesting photos.  Here's a bunch of example cards:

#413

#075

#060

#222

#383

#017

#129

#289

#285

#355

Here's what the card backs look like.  These have been pretty much the same in every NPB set so far - they have a cropped version of the photo from the front on the card and the player's stats for his last three years (at most) in NPB with no stats for any other leagues (MLB, KBO or CPBL).  Here's an example back:

#208 (Masataka Yoshida)

I mentioned that there were 12 "Legendary Player" cards that featured OB players.  Eleven of those twelve players are actually retired - Shijiro Hiyama, Masumi Kuwata, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Shinya Miyamoto, Eishin Soyogi, Hitoshi Tamura, Yoshitomo Tani, Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, Kiyoshi Toyoda, Teppei (Tsuchiya) and Shunsuke Watanabe - but the other one is still active in MLB - Shohei Ohtani:

#437

I'm pretty much convinced the only reason the "Legendary Player" cards are in the set is so that Epoch can include autographed cards of them in packs.

As always you can see all the cards (along with the parallels and inserts) over at Jambalaya.