2022 Epoch NPB set

When Epoch first announced that they were doing an annual "flagship" set back in 2018, I was hoping it would result in two things.  The first is that it would pressure BBM into doing a better job with their "flagship" 1st and 2nd Version sets and the second was that Epoch's "flagship" NPB set would develop into an outstanding product.  Four years and five NPB sets later, I feel that one of those things has happened - BBM has definitely improved the photography in their 1st and 2nd Version sets although they have not increased the size of either set.  But I don't feel like Epoch's NPB set has become an outstanding product.  Now don't get me wrong, the new 2022 edition of Epoch's NPB set isn't bad, it's just not particularly good.  

Let me give you the particulars of the set - if you've read about any of the previous four editions this will be familiar to you.  The set contains 432 cards which works out to 36 cards for each of the 12 NPB teams.  Those 36 cards include the team's manager and the entire 2022 rookie class (or the entire 2021 draft class not including development players).  For the third year in a row the set also includes 12 OB players (one from each team) and for the second year in a row all the OB player cards are short printed.  The set is considered complete without the short printed cards.

With 36 players per team in this set as compared to the 27 per team in BBM's 1st Version set, you'd expect there would be at least 108 players in this set that don't appear in BBM's set.  The number is actually 116 which is the smallest number of players exclusively in the NPB set ever.  These players include Seiya Inoue, Rei Takahashi, Shintaro Fujinami, Fumihito Haraguchi, Shota Dohbayashi, Kenshi Sugiya, Seiichi Uchikawa and Seiji Kobayashi along with foreign players like CC Mercedes, Rubby De La Rose, Robert Corniel, Cy Sneed, Alan Busenitz, Raul Alcantara, Carter Stewart, Ariel Martinez and Enny Romero.  It's kind of odd though that despite being released about six weeks after BBM's 1st Version set, Epoch had the same inability to include any of the new-for-2022 foreign players such as Brian O'Grady, Ryan McBroom, Gregory Polanco or Adam Walker.  While BBM will undoubtedly include many of these players in their 2nd Version set, Epoch has never done an update set for the NPB set.

I should mention that there are eight players who appear in the 1st Version set but not in the NPB set - Daiki Iwashita and Katsuya Kakunaka of the Marines, Shohei Katoh and Yuki Okabayashi of the Dragons, Colin Rea of the Hawks, Tomohiro Abe of the Carp, Seiji Kawagoe of the Lions and Fernando Romero of the Baystars.

My main gripe with the set is that there's a lot of dull and repetitive photography in it.  Some teams have better photo selection than others but on the whole there's way too many "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses.  And sometimes there's even less diversity than just "pitchers pitching" would imply - almost all the non-rookie Marines pitchers had their photos taken from a similar position so that you can see the infield dirt around second base in the background.  And then there's the cards for four of the Swallow's five draft picks that have photos that all look like they were taken in the infield of Yakult's farm team field in Toda - it reminds me of the minor league sets from the 1990's where it was obvious all the players had their photos taken in the exact same spot at the ballpark:

#'s 032, 034, 035 & 036

The other kind of annoying thing about the photography is there's a number of photos that are studio shots with a white background, probably taken on a pre-season "photo day".  While it's not unusual for Epoch to use photos like this, there seems to be a lot more in this set than in the past.  It's particularly notable that over three quarters of the Fighters cards have a white background, including their manager:

#361

This is the first card that I'm aware of where Tsuyoshi Shinjyo is labeled "BigBoss".

There are some exceptions to the dull photography however.  Here's some cards with photos I thought were pretty good:

#090

#314

#422

#113

#062

#352

The backs look pretty much the same as every other edition of the set.  There's 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, CPBL, Cuba, etc).  Here's the back of Yoshihisa Hirano's card as an example - you can see his 2018-20 seasons in MLB are not included:

As always, Jambalaya has the entire set on-line so you can check out the cards yourself and see if you agree with me about the photography.