2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition

My latest package from ZenMarket arrived yesterday.  It contained five sets that were released in Japan over the past two months which means I'll be doing posts about them over the next week or so.  I thought I'd kick things off with the 2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition set.

It's not very often that I pick up one of Epoch's Premier Edition team sets and I was kind of disappointed with the last one I got so I hadn't expected to be all that interested in this one.  There were a couple of things that made me change my mind though - I'll explain as I go along.

As usual, what I got was the base set.  It contains 45 cards - 36 cards for current Fighters players and 9 cards for "Legendary Players" - OB Fighters players.  The active players include pretty much everyone you'd expect, including Hiromi Itoh, Chusei Mannami, Shin Mizutani, Sachiya Yamasaki, Takayuki Katoh, Kotaro Kiyomiya and Go Matsumoto.  They also include all five of the Fighters' 2024 "rookie class" (i.e. the 2023 draftees).  Curiously there is not a card of manager Tsuyoshi Shinjyo and Ariel Martinez is the only Western player included.

The cards are pretty attractive.  I don't know if it's standard among Epoch's Premier Edition sets but these cards are on a thicker stock which have a little heft to them.  The card design is attractive and the photo selection is decent for an Epoch set.  Here's some examples (please note that my scanner cropped a little bit of the bottom of each card off):

#02

#30

#33

#24

#07

#17

One odd thing about the set was that there were seven players whose photos were studio shots before a white background.  This included four of the five 2024 rookies along with two established players - Yudai Furukawa and Yuta Kuroki.  Epoch's been doing more and more of this the past few years and I really don't understand why.

#27

You may have noticed that I said there were seven players with studio shots for photos but I only identified six of them.  The seventh was kind of interesting and one of the reasons I decided to pick up the set.  Last fall the Fighters signed a pitcher from a Taiwanese high school to their ikusei squad - this set contains the only card I've seen of him (although it would not surprise me if he was in a Fighters fan club set):

#25

The Fighters have never had a good OB team set.  The only one that BBM's ever done for them was the 2013 Fighters 10th Season With Hokkaido set which, as its name implies, only covers the team since it moved to Hokkaido in 2004.  So the fact that this set included OB Fighters players from before the move made it a little more attractive to me.  Especially since they weren't just random players included because they were around to sign autographs - there's some pretty big names here (although not Yu Darvish or Shohei Ohtani).  The nine players are Yutaka Enatsu, Atsunori Inaba, Tsutomu Iwamoto, Junichi Kashiwabara, Isamu Kida, Yukihiro Nishizaki, Michihiro Ogasawara, Kensuke Tanaka and Yukio Tanaka.  Enatsu was kind of the big attraction here for me - he's pretty much only been in the ultra-high end Epoch sets over the past eight or nine years.  The photos of the three oldest players - Kashiwabara, Enatsu and Kida - are kind of odd as the player is in color but the background is in black and white.  Here's a couple of the OB cards:

#39

#43

#45

While several of the OB players were with the Fighters once they moved up north, only Inaba and Kensuke Tanaka are depicted as Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.  The other seven are all shown with the Tokyo-based version of the team.

As always, you can check out all the cards over at Jambalaya.