That delayed 2021 set was the Holografica set, an ultra-high-end set (boxes of six cards had an MSRP of 15,000 yen) done in conjunction with the Japan Baseball Promotion Association (JBPA) - aka the OB Club. It would be the only set Epoch did with the OB Club last year which is unusual. Epoch and the OB Club have collaborated on at least one set every year since 2009 - in fact Epoch didn't do sets WITHOUT the OB Club for four or five years after they started doing baseball cards regularly in 2009. It's kind of a big deal and I wish I knew more about why the two outfits parted ways.
Epoch had been doing "reasonably priced" team sets since 2018 under the label "Rookies & Stars". They never did all 12 teams and the sets were only "comprehensive" (by which I mean contained the team's entire 70 man roster) in 2018 and 2019. They did away with the "Rookies & Stars" label this year and instead issued these team sets under the label "Premier Edition". The base sets for these team sets were anywhere from 29 to 45 cards and often included a couple of OB players along with the active players. Epoch did these sets for eight of the twelve teams - the Carp, Tigers, Dragons, Lions, Buffaloes, Baystars, Fighters and Swallows (or all the teams they did "Rookies & Stars" sets for in 2021 except the Hawks).
For the fifth consecutive year Epoch issued their flagship 432 card NPB set. For the first time, however, they also issued a smaller (108 card) "premium" version of the NPB set called "NPB Luxury Collection". You can think of it as Epoch's version of doing what Topps does with their Chrome sets - making an uglier but more expensive parallel version of their flagship set. Epoch published their "Pacific League Rookies" box set, also for the fifth consecutive year.
The rest of Epoch's offerings for the year were all expensive sets, starting off with the "Sadaharu Oh Super Luxury" set. This extremely exclusive set was sold in boxes of four cards (one of which was guaranteed to be an autograph) for...um...Epoch actually never set an MSRP for it but I saw a box listed on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for 500,000 yen or roughly $4200. The rest of the sets were not quite that expensive although still more than I'm willing to pay. Epoch issued six of their combined active/OB team sets under the "Stars & Legends" line. This time the teams were the Hawks, Marines, Carp, Tigers, Eagles and Giants. Each of these sets were sold in boxes containing four cards for either 17,000 yen or (in the case of the Giants and Marines) 20,000 yen. The other ultra-high-end set Epoch put out was the "Pacific League Premier Edition" set which they've done every year since 2016. This set was sold in six card boxes for 15,000 yen.
Epoch also continued to issued their on-demand Epoch One cards. This year's set weighed in at a whopping 1009 cards, blowing away the previous record of 766 cards in the 2019 set. Cards were only issued for the same nine teams that they were issued for last year - the Marines, Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Fighters, Lions, Eagles, Swallows and Giants.
3 comments:
As I've begun compiling the 2022 Epoch One checklist I found on Yahoo Auctions that there are also Epoch One Holo Spectra versions of some cards with a more limited print run. Not sure if those parallel the entire set.
Translated from Epoch's website about the cards, "From the EPOCH-ONE immediately after its release, we will release a limited number of selected cards that were particularly popular..."
Yeah, they've been doing those since 2019. I haven't paid much attention to them. There's a page on their website about them - it's not all the cards and the print runs seem to go between 10 and 50 cards (although I didn't do a thorough look). I think they use the same numbering system as the regular cards but they put "-H" on the end of the number.
There are also these "Signature" versions that are sold as team sets - not all the cards in the sets were actually issued as Epoch One cards. There's a couple teams - the Carp and Baystars - that have these but don't have Epoch One cards.
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