2023 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection

Late last year Epoch released the first edition of their "NPB Luxury Collection" set, the upscale version of their flagship set.  I wasn't very interested in it as I felt it was pretty much just an ugly Chrome-ish parallel of a quarter of the original 2022 NPB set.  Here's an example to show what I mean:

2022 Epoch NPB #166 (left), 2022 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #039 (right)

So I wasn't expecting to be too interested in this year's edition of the set.  But since there was one card in the set last year which was significantly different than the original card I figured I'd take a look and see if any of the cards featured new photos.  What I found surprised me:

All the photos were different!  Every single card had a new photo on it.  Granted, some of them weren't TOO different but still...

2023 Epoch NPB #215 (left), 2023 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #33 (right)

I was intrigued enough by the new photos that I decided to break character for a second time in a month and pick up the set through ZenMarket.  I was able to get one reasonably cheap (1500 yen plus 510 yen for shipping plus 300 yen for ZenMarket's fee) which was around $16.  I received the set late last week and had my second surprise about it:

The cards don't have a "Chrome-ish" finish on them!  As you can tell by the scan above, the cards have pretty much the same appearance as the original set.  The biggest difference that I can see is that the Luxury Collection cards appear to be a little thicker than the original set's cards.  

Besides the new photos and the lack of the "Chrome" finish, Epoch made another more basic change to the set.  Last year's set contained 108 cards split evenly between the 12 NPB teams so that there were nine cards per team.  This year Epoch shrunk the set to just 90 cards and - as you may have already figured out by doing the math - the cards aren't split evenly between the 12 teams.  

Actually, I'm being a little misleading as there's an eight card "Legendary Player" subset in the set (which I'll talk more about in a minute) so there's really only 82 cards for current players.  But there's still no way to make 12 go into 82 evenly.

Epoch somewhat unsurprisingly decided to center this set around rookies.  Or at least "rookies" in the baseball card sense which means "players taken in last year's draft" rather than the official "players with less than x number of at bats or x number of innings pitched".  It's standard for both BBM and Epoch to include all the players taken in the "regular" phase of the previous year's draft in their flagship sets (1st Version and NPB respectively).  Epoch decided to also include all of these players in the NPB Luxury* Collection which accounts for 69 of those 82 active player cards.  Each team drafted between five and seven players last year which is why the number of cards isn't evenly divisible.

*"Luxury" should ideally be pronounced the same way Graham Chapman said it during the "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch.

Epoch had a decent variety of poses on the rookie cards.  My only gripe at all is that some of the players who had studio photos in the original set still have studio photos in this set - but just using a different pose.  Here's some examples of the rookie cards:

#45

#14

#18

#40

#06

In addition, Epoch included 12 cards of veterans - one for each team.  There's a lot of star power amongst these twelve players as they include Roki Sasaki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami, Yuki Yanagita, Shugo Maki, Masahiro Tanaka and Teruaki Satoh.  Here's a couple examples:

#75

#77

#71

If you're counting along, you'll find that we've accounted for 81 of the 82 active player cards.  Who's the other card for?  Dragons pitcher pitcher Shinya Matsuyama was the team's first pick in the development player (ikusei) portion of last fall's draft and was moved onto the 70 man roster in early June.  Epoch included a card of him in this set although he did not appear in the original NPB set.  This is the only card of Matsuyama as a registered player - all the other cards of him this year (BBM's Rookie Edition, Epoch's Dragons Premier Edition and the Bowman NPB set) have him as an ikusei player.

#70

What I find kind of odd about Epoch including Matsuyama is that he wasn't the only player from last year's development player draft who ended up on the official roster of their team this year.  If I'm counting right, I think there were nine in all.  I don't understand why he's in the set but none of the other eight are, especially considering that one player - Tokumasa Chano of Orix - was registered to the 70 man roster before the season started and played in 91 games with the ichi-gun squad.  It could be a simple as they needed one guy to even out the number of cards in the set.

I mentioned that there were eight "Legendary Player" cards in the set.  These are OB players and are similar to the 12 "Legendary Player" cards from the original NPB set.  The big difference is that only one of the 12 players from the original set is included in this set and that player - Seiichi Uchikawa - is shown with the Hawks in this set while being a Baystar in the NPB set.  Actually that's not entirely true as there's another "Legendary Player" who's in the original set - he's just not a "Legendary Player" there but manager of the Lions - Kazuo Matsui.

#83

#84

I want to mention two things about this set that I was very amused by and they both involve the Fighters.  The first is that the card of two-way rookie Kota Yazawa shows him batting while his card in the original set showed him pitching (in fairness, a great deal of his cards this year show him batting rather than pitching):

#29

If you look at the design of the cards, you see that the border on the front of the card more or less matches one of the team's primary uniform colors.  The Fighters cards have a blue border, the Marines cards have a black border, the Eagles cards have a Maroon border, etc.  The other thing that really amused me about the set is that two of the Fighters cards show the players wearing those crazy black and red alternate uniforms that Tsuyoshi Shinjo designed.  On both of those cards, Epoch changed the border color to black to match those uniforms rather keeping them blue like the rest of the Fighters cards:

#76

#34

I just wish Itoh's card had the name in red as well.

So it's probably pretty obvious now that I like this set although I'd be hard pressed to explain why.  I guess it's just nice to see a card company put out a higher end set that I don't hate.  You can look at all the cards in the set over at Jambalaya and see what you think.