They're Here!

Topps' NPB set was released this past week and I've been seeing cards starting to show up on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and Twitter.  I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to get the set but I thought I'd do a quick post based on some of the images from the auctions.

The base set is 216 cards which I'm going to assume is evenly split among the 12 teams which would imply that there are 18 cards per team.  Everything appears to be a player card - I haven't seen any subsets or checklists.  There are seven different parallels for the base set cards - "Gold Rainbox Foil", "Rainbow Foil" (#'d to 150), "Vintage Stock" (#'d to 99) (which appears to mean that it has the old 1970's era Topps logo on it), "Blue Foil" (#'d to 50), "Orange Foil" (#'d to 25), "Red Foil" (#'d to 5) and "RayFoil" (1 of 1).  There are two insert sets - "1986 Baseball" which shows a player using a similar design to the 1986 Topps set and "Team Programs" which show kind of creepy mug shot photos of two players from each team.  There are parallels for both inserts but I don't know any details.

Here's what the front of one of the base cards looks like:

Similar design to the 2021 Topps MLB cards with the Topps logo and the team logo switched and a ridiculous amount of white space around the shrunken team logo.  And if you like white space around the team logo, you're going to love what the card backs look like:

I mean, no one's going to decide against buying baseball cards based on the back but this is pretty weak.  They only include last year's stats along with the player's career totals.  Oh, wait, that's only if the player played in NPB last year - Masahiro Tanaka was a Yankee last year so his card only has his NPB career totals.  The biographical information is pretty bare bones - height (in centimeters), weight (in kilograms), which arm he bats and throws with, date of birth, year drafted and uniform number.  BBM, Calbee and Epoch's backs will tell you where the player went to high school and college as well as what round they were taken in the draft.

The rookie cards use a symbol a little bit different then the ones on the MLB cards since the ones on the MLB cards contains the MLB logo:

I had been intrigued by the "1986 Baseball" inserts since I first heard of them, especially since I thought one of the few interesting things I thought Topps could bring to the Japanese card market was their vintage designs.  The design isn't quite a match on the front as they decided to include the team logo as well but otherwise it's pretty close:

I want to point out something odd about Masahiro Tanaka's card in the subset (and probably any other Eagles in it).  I've noticed for a while now that there are two teams that constantly have their corporate name included on player cards when the team name is spelled out - the Eagles (who are referred to as the "Rakuten Eagles") and the Tigers (the "Hanshin Tigers").  The other teams will just go by the team nickname - Marines, Dragons, Hawks, etc.  Now as you can see above, the "1986 Baseball" cards for Hanshin just use "Tigers".  But the Eagles cards use "Rakuten Eagles" and it's not a good look:

The backs of the "1986 Baseball" inserts kind of resemble the 1986 Topps backs although again, there's not a lot to them:

Here's a video of someone opening a box of the set.  It's a good way to get a look at a lot of the cards along with some of the parallels and inserts.  The photo selection on the cards actually seems pretty good.

I'm waiting to see what the base sets are selling for before I decide if I'm going to get the set or not.  If it's more than $30 to $40 I'll probably pass.

UPDATE - the set's checklist (with images) has been uploaded to TradingCardDB and the set is also on-line at Jambalaya.