2023 Topps 206

Topps released the NPB version of their 206 set back at the beginning of December.  This is Topps' take on the classic T206 tobacco set.  They've done three or four MLB versions of this over the past 20 years or so but this is the first time they've done an NPB version.

My first thought when I saw the promotional materials for this set kicking around on Twitter was that it was a "mugshot" set.  It seemed like all the cards I saw showed "head and shoulder" shots of all the players.  But I figured I'd wait and see what the cards looked like when they got released.

Well, the set got released and I took a look and, yep, it's a "mugshot" set.  All the images in the base set are "head and shoulder" views of the players.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but it made me not very interested in picking up the set.  Luckily my friend Jason was kind enough to send me a handful of cards from the set so I'd have some examples to write about.  It's kind of funny - I'm not a big fan of the set and I had mentioned to someone on Twitter that the 20 or so cards Jason had sent me were more than enough.  But I've picked up seven more cards from the set over the past month off Ebay so apparently it wasn't enough.

So let's get into it, shall we?  First up, some details about the set.  It's got 216 cards in the base set which is (as always) split up evenly between the twelve teams with each team having 18 cards each.  Those 18 cards include the team's manager and three rookies (which I assume are the top three 2022 draft picks but I'll confess that I didn't actually check that).  Most of the major players in NPB are in the set - Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Munetaka Murakami, Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, etc.  Probably the biggest name I see missing is Yudai Ohno.  There's eleven players who show up in this set but were not in either the Topps NPB or NPB Chrome sets - Yuki Fukunaga, Seigi Tanaka, Matt Davidson, Seiya Hosokawa, Tokumasa Chano, Takaya Ishikawa, Tsuyoshu Yamasaki, Ryoya Kurihara, Shunsuke Sato, Minato Aoyama and Tatsuya Imai.  

Here's several of the base set cards:

#126

#187

#109

#67

#134

Not really sure what the deal is with some of the backgrounds.  Murakami looks like he might be on a tropical island and I think Nakamura and Yamada are at the fair.

Here's what the backs look like.  It may be hard to believe but they have even less information on them than the standard Topps NPB cards do:

#191 (Yutaro Sugimoto)

One thing I will mention that both Jason and I like about the cards is that they feel more like vintage baseball cards that most modern cards do.  The front is glossy but the back feels more like cardboard.

This being Topps and all, the set has a fricking metric sh*t ton of parallels.  So many that I'm actually not sure what all of them are.  I'm also not sure which ones are the most common although I'll hazard a guess that it's probably these brown bordered versions:

#97

The other somewhat common parallel appears to be the "alternate image" one.  These use a non-mugshot image on them.  I think there's actually only 60 cards (five per team) that have this parallel.

#92

Here's another "alternate image" parallel (without the base version):

#210

The parallel that I found kind of interesting were the "stadium background" ones.  These show the facade of the player's home stadium as the background image.  Here's two of these:

#62

#43

Now this is where this starts getting odd.  There are apparently numbered foil parallels as well, including for the "stadium background" ones.  So yeah, there are parallels of the parallels!  It's like Inception or something.  Here's "rainbow foil" version of Ryosuke Kikuchi's card - it's numbered to 99:

#110

And the "orange foil" version of Shogo Akiyama's card which is numbered to 50:

#176

The backs of these two cards are glossy like most modern cards rather than the cardboard-y feel of hte others.

Every card in the set also has a "mini" parallel.  These are roughly the size of the original T206 sets - roughly 1 1/2 by 2 5/8 inches.  Here's one in comparison with a regular sized card:

#201 (left) & #107 (right)

It was not enough for the fronts of the cards in this set to have a myriad of different versions, so Topps decided they needed to also have different versions of the backs.  Jason sent me two versions of this card of Kazuyoshi Tatsunami.  The fronts of both cards look like this:

#152

But the backs are different:

You can see that the "rabbit" version is numbered to 99.  There's a rarer "lucky cat" version that is apparently numbered to 7.  Both backs are possible in the full size and the mini cards.  

You can take a look at a lot of the cards (but not the complete set) over at Jambalaya.  They also have a bunch of the rarer parallels as well.

And I want to thank Jason for sending me most of the cards I've showed in this post.  I don't want my feeling of "meh" about the set to imply that I'm not grateful to him for his generosity.  (If you're curious, the cards I picked up off of Ebay were the four "stadium background" cards, the two Imanaga cards and the Murakami card.  The purchases were spaced out just far enough apart that I felt I needed to wait until the latest one showed up before I could write this post.  Which is why it took me over a month to get around to writing it!)