2023 Topps Japan Edition WBC Cards

I mentioned a few weeks back that the 2023 Topps Japan Edition set included some WBC related items.  I guess to be completely accurate, it included some Samurai Japan related items.  There was a 25 card "Japanese National Team" insert set plus some autographed and memorabilia cards.  Well, sort of memorabilia cards - I'll get to that in a minute.  I picked up the "Japanese National Team" insert set last month and I wanted to do a quick post about it.

Those 25 cards represent 24 players because, as you might expect, there's two cards for Shohei Ohtani - one pitching and one batting.  The other players in the set include Yasuhiro Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Munetaka Murakami, Kensuke Kondoh, Yu Darvish, Shota Imanaga, Masataka Yoshida, Tetsuto Yamada, Shugo Maki and Sosuke Genda.  And, of course, Lars Nootbaar.  It's a little easier to list who's NOT in the set - Yuki Matsui, Takuya Kai, Ryoji Kuribayashi, Takumi Ohshiro, Keiji Takahashi, Yuki Udagawa and Soichiro Yamazaki.  There are ten players in the set who did not appear in any US based WBC sets (they were all in the on demand Topps Samurai Japan team set that was only available in Japan) - Hiromi Itoh, Taisei Makihara, Hiroya Miyagi, Yuhei Nakamura, Takumu Nakano, Taisei Ota, Ukyo Shuto, Shosei Togo, Hotoka Yamakawa and Atsuki Yuasa (Miyagi and Nakamura were both the BBM Infinity set).

The cards are attractive enough although I'm not a big fan of sets where the player's image is superimposed on a common background.  At least this time Topps didn't use a Japanese flag as the background - seems like that was a common theme of several of their WBC sets this year and it kind of got old after a while.  Here's some example cards:

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#WBC-22

The backs have some comments about the player's performance during the tournament along with their WBC statistics.  And by WBC statistics, I don't just mean the 2023 WBC - Darvish's includes his numbers from the 2009 WBC and Yamada's includes his from the 2017 tournament.  The one thing I think is odd is if this set is supposed be for the Japanese market, why's the back in English?

In addition to the "Japan National Team" insert set, I decided to pick up one of the "Japanese National Team Patch" memorabilia cards.  There are 16 of these in all and they're all serially numbered to 99.  The "patch" is kind of odd - rather than being cloth, it feels like it's made of vinyl or something.  It was not what I was expecting but I don't know what the little flags on the player's sleeves are actually made of.

WBCP-ST

That probably sounds a bit strange, saying "I don't know what the little flags on the player's sleeves are actually made of" when I have a patch card in my hand.  The reason I say that is that the back of the card says that "The relic on the front of this card was specifically created for 2023 Topps Baseball Japan":

So it's a manufactured relic.  I guess that shouldn't be a major surprise as it's not like there'd be 99 game used ones per player.  But it does mean that the authentic ones aren't necessarily made out of vinyl.  

Having picked up one of these, I don't really have any great urge to pick up any others.