Thursday, October 5, 2017

2017 Epoch Pacific League Set

Epoch put out a number of reasonably priced card sets this past summer.  I'll be posting about their individual team sets soon but I want to start off with their Pacific League set.

As you might expect from the name of the set, the Pacific League set features players from the six Pacific League teams.  The base set has 54 cards - nine from each team.  The player selection is kind of what you'd expect - most of the big stars for each team are included like Shohei Ohtani, Daichi Suzuki, Shogo Akiyama, Takeya Nakamura, Takahiro Norimoto, Yuki Matsui, Kazuo Matsui, Yuki Yanagita and T-Okada.  There are no foreign players in the set however, so no Brandon Laird, Ernesto Mejia or Alfredo Despaigne.  Each team's top pick from last fall's NPB draft is included (which makes this set the third I've written about lately to feature the number one picks from the 2016 draft after the Calbee Series Two and the Icons - Japan Pride sets).

The cards are fairly attractive, even though I tend to prefer borderless cards.  Here are some examples:

#26

#15

#39

#01

#32

#54
Epoch issued each of their cheaper sets with a bunch of variations and this set was no exception.  I didn't get anything beyond the base set however.  Ryan did a post about the set that showed some variations and Jambalaya has a bunch of them on their site (as well as the parallel issues).  And as you might expect, the first photo variant (as opposed to a simple photo crop variant) shows Ohtani pitching.

Last year Epoch did a high end Pacific League set and matched it with a Central League set that was issued with Kabaya gum (although the PL set was 54 cards and the CL set was only 36).  This year there has been no corresponding CL set but Epoch did issue inexpensive team sets for all six CL teams while only doing sets for two of the PL teams.  (There is also high end PL set that was issued by Epoch last week.)

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