Friday, January 28, 2022

Topps Coda: Chrome

The Chrome version of Topps' NPB set was released last week.  Personally I'm not a big fan of the Chome sets from Topps - I think they're kind of ugly.  But I was intrigued by the set for one reason - I had read some posts on the Shlabotnik Report that explained that the Chrome cards weren't always ugly expensive parallel of the non-Chrome Topps cards - sometimes Topps either used a different photo for a player or added a player to the Chrome set who wasn't in the non-Chrome set.  So I was curious if either of those things happened with the Chrome NPB set.  It wouldn't be enough to make we want to buy the set but I might be interested in picking up the variations.

The Chrome NPB set contains 216 cards in its base set, the same as the non-Chrome version.  After a pretty thorough investigation, I've concluded that there aren't any players who appear in one set but not the other - both sets contain the same 216 players.  What's odd though is that the checklists aren't the same - 163 of the cards have a different number in one set than the other.  For example, Seiya Suzuki is card #80 in the non-Chrome version but #139 in the Chrome set.  This means 53 of the cards have the same number in both sets - for some reason all 18 of the Giants cards are included in those 53.  I have no explanation for any of this - I just point it out because it seems so odd to me.  

So I'm completely confident that there are no players in Chrome who aren't in the non-Chrome set.  I'm almost completely confident that there aren't any photos in the Chrome set that weren't in the non-Chrome set.  I didn't actually compare all 216 photos but I looked at a lot of them and didn't see any differences.  So it doesn't look like there are any variations for me to pick up somewhere.

I should mention here that the insert sets for the Chrome set are a little different than those of the regular set.  The regular set had two insert sets - the 24 card "1986" set and the 12 card "Team Programs" set.  Chrome has three insert sets - a Chrome version of the "1986" set plus a 12 card "Prismic Power" set and a 24 card "Stadium Sluggers" set.  I assume that the players and photos are the same in both "1986" insert sets but I didn't actually verify that.

If you want to examine the Chrome cards yourself, you can see them in all their glory over at Jambalaya.

1 comment:

twycchang said...

Just bought the 60 insert cards for $90. BTW though the Chrome version uses the same photos of the non-Chrome version, it does position the ugly white space differently for some cards (to make the fronts less ugly). For example:

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/291350/cid/17611987/2021-Topps-NPB-80-Seiya-Suzuki?PageIndex=1

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/297475/cid/17903801/2021-Topps-Chrome-NPB-139-Seiya-Suzuki?PageIndex=1