Monday, October 9, 2017

2017 Epoch Tigers "Master" set

Ryan somehow picked me up a "master" set for the 2017 Epoch Tigers set.  Well, I guess it's really not a "master" set as it doesn't include any signature parallels or inserts but it does include all of the variants of the base cards.  This is somewhat less complicated than some of the other Epoch team sets as there are only two sets of variants rather than five(!).

My post here is going to kind of echo what Ryan's already written about the set but hopefully I've got some new things to say about the set.  The base set has 36 cards - 8 of which are the Tigers' 2016 draft class.  The base set also includes cards for manager Tomoaki Kanemoto and ni-gun manager Masayuki Kakefu (aka Mr Tigers).  The set pretty much has everyone you'd expect - Kosuke Fukudome, Takeshi Toritani, Randy Messenger, Yoshio Itoi, Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Shintaro Fujinami, etc.

There are 36 "1 *" variants for the set so (obviously) one for each card in the set.  Ryan says that these are all photo variants but I have to disagree with him - the majority of them are actually crop variants.  There are only four actual photo variants among the "1 *"s - Fujinami, Fumiya Hojoh, Itoi and Toritani.  There are 18 "2 *" variants for the set that are all photo variants.  So the total number of cards that I have for this set is 90.

Here's some examples of the variants - first all three of the Itoi cards (base card on the left, then "1 *" variant, then "2 *" variant:

#31 
As Ryan points out the backs for all three cards are identical except for the "*" or "**" on the bottom left of the cards.  This is obviously how you tell if the card is a one or two star variant.  Note that the photo on the back is still the one from the base card:

Backs of #31
Just for comparison, here are the base card and "1 *" variant for Kosuke Fukudome so you can see what a cropped variant looks like:

#32
I've probably beaten the variant stuff to death now so I'll just show off a couple more cards from the set.  (As always you can see them all at Jambalaya.)

#02

#35

#24 (1 * variant)

#27 (2 * variant)

One other thing Ryan included with the set is the promo card of Kento Itohara.  As he points out in his post, this is a very odd promo card in that it doesn't look much like the regular cards in the set.  Really the only thing the promo card and the regular card of Itohara have in common is the photo on the card.  Here's the promo card:

Promo
 Here's the regular card:

#30
Weird, huh?  I wonder if the promo was a design Epoch thought of using and decided against after they already printing the promo.

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