Epoch continued to make their "Rookies & Stars" team sets in 2021. These are pack based sets with a 36 card base set. For whatever reason, Epoch only does these sets for a subset of the 12 teams - this year they did them for the Baystars, Buffaloes, Carp, Dragons, Fighters, Hawks, Lions, Swallows and Tigers - everyone but the Eagles, Giants and Marines.
I had gotten some of these sets last year and was kind of "meh" about them but I decided that I liked the card designs enough this year that I asked Ryan to pick up all nine of them for me IF (and this is a big IF) he could get each set for 500 yen (around $5) or less. Ultimately he was only able to find four of them that met that criteria - the Baystars, Carp, Hawks and Lions.
Like the cards in the 2020 Rookies & Stars sets, the cards in this year's sets are thicker stock than regular cards. The photos are still kind of generic but I think Epoch has made a bit of an effort in improving the selection. I'm not sure how player selection was done for each team but it's a little different for each set. All four sets have the team's entire 2021 non-ikusei rookie class but the Baystars and Lions sets have the ikusei rookies as well. The Baystars and Hawks sets include the team's managers (Daisuke Miura and Kimiyasu Kudoh respectively) but the Carp and Lions sets don't. Each set contains the big stars for each team plus some fan favorites who don't see as much playing time - for example the Lions set includes Daisuke Matsuzaka in addition to Takumi Kuriyama, Tomoya Mori, Shuta Tonosaki and Takeya Nakamura.
Both the Baystars and Hawks sets include photos of rookies at their introductory press conference holding up shikishi with their signatures on it. Some of the cards of the Lions rookies used posed studio photos. Almost every Carp pitcher is wearing what I think is a spring training cap in their photos - it's red with a white front panel and a red "C" rather than the standard all red cap with a white "C".
Here's a couple sample cards from each set:
 |
| 2021 Epoch Baystars Rookies & Stars #01 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Baystars Rookies & Stars #08 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Baystars Rookies & Stars #06 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Baystars Rookies & Stars #29 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Carp Rookies & Stars #05 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Carp Rookies & Stars #31 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Carp Rookies & Stars #32 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Carp Rookies & Stars #07 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Hawks Rookies & Stars #04 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Hawks Rookies & Stars #19 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Hawks Rookies & Stars #08 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Hawks Rookies & Stars #25 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars #23 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars #22 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars #21 |
 |
| 2021 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars #17 |
Like I said about
a couple of the 2020 sets recently, these sets are nice but kind of redundant if you're like me and get all twelve of BBM's "comprehensive" team sets. I won't say I won't get any more of these in the future but I probably won't entertain the idea of getting a full run of them again.
No comments:
Post a Comment