Luxury And Chrome

Epoch released their "NPB Luxury Collection" the other day.  My first impression of it was that it was Epoch's version of Topps Chrome - basically an ugly parallel version of their flagship set, although in this case it's only ugly parallels of a quarter of the set (108 out of 432 cards).  But once I took a closer look at the set, I realized there's a little bit more to it than that.

Now don't get me wrong - it really is an ugly "chrome" parallel of a quarter of the original NPB set from last May.  However two "Luxury" cards are different than their original cards - one's a minor change but the other's a little bigger.

The minor change is on Eagles rookie Katsutoshi Tai's card.  For God only knows what reason, they photoshopped the white face on his hat on his NPB card to be solid maroon on his "Luxury" card:

2022 Epoch NPB #321

2022 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #78

The bigger change was on Akira Neo's card.  Neo switched from being an outfielder to being a pitcher back in June and Epoch updated his card accordingly:

2022 Epoch NPB #171

  2022 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #37

 (I swiped the card images off of Jambalaya.)

Speaking of Topps Chrome, the 2022 edition of it was released a couple weeks ago and I did a similar comparison off all the cards.  This process was much easier this year as the checklists were identical, right down to the missing card #117 - unlike last year where the two sets contained the same cards but the checklists were different.  From what I could tell, there's no differences in the cards in the original Topps NPB set and the Chrome set.  I have previously castigated Topps for not having Neo as a pitcher in their NPB set which came out in September, three months after he made the switch.  The fact that they didn't bother updating his card for the Chrome set is pretty much just par for the course with Topps.