2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB

I make fun of Topps' NPB offerings a lot here and with pretty good reason.  I feel like Topps is pretty lazy and/or sloppy with their Japanese products, especially in comparison with BBM's sets.  I was intrigued, though, a few months back when Topps announced they'd be doing a Stadium Club set for NPB.  Stadium Club has always been an MLB product I've admired - it's always looked like they had some outstanding photography - and I had long wondered what an NPB version would look like.  The set was released in mid-December and I liked what I saw of it on Jambalaya enough that I decided to pick it up.  I got a complete set through ZenMarket and it got delivered to my house yesterday.

As I went through the cards last night, I was kind of surprised to discover how much I really liked the set.  I mean, obviously I thought I was going to like it or I wouldn't have ordered it but I really wasn't expecting how much better the cards would look in person then they did on Jambalaya's website.  Don't get me wrong - there's still a lot of nit-picky things that annoy me about the set so I'm not totally going off brand here, but for the most part, this is a really good set.  

The base set contains 216 cards which, as you probably can guess, are split evenly between the 12 teams so there's 18 cards per team.  Each team's manager and top three 2023 draft picks are included in those 18 cards.  Most of the big stars of NPB are in the set - Roki Ssaaki, Munetaka Murakami, Tomoyuki Sugano, Kazuma Okamoto, Kensuke Kondoh, etc.

This set really lives up to Stadium Club's reputation for good photography.  There's a lot of great photos included and the cards themselves just look really good.  Here's a handful of examples:

#91

#54

#81

#53

#103

#195

#75

#182

#169

#33

I mean, you just look at these photos and you hold your breath, hoping Tyler Austin didn't hurt himself on that play.  You can just sense the speed of Okabayashi.  Even the more mundane photos with a "pitcher pitching" pose look pretty good:

#122

I thought Murakami's photo looked familiar:

#184

A similar photo was used on an Epoch One card last April.  I assume it's from the same game (if not almost the same moment):

2024 Epoch One #271

To be clear - not all the photos in the set are breathtaking masterpieces.  But there's a really good variety of interesting shots and a healthy number of horizontally oriented cards.  One of the few things that I haven't complained about Topps' NPB cards is their photo selection and this set probably has the best.

My main nit-picky thing about this set to complain about is the card backs.  Once again, Topps has made no real effort on their card backs.  At least they're a little more colorful this time:

#160 (Chusei Mannami)

The one other minor complaint about the set is the inclusion of the managers.  I'm not sure I understand the point of having a set that specializes in interesting photos and include 12 cards of guys who it's going to be very difficult to have an interesting photo of.  Probably the dullest of these twelve cards is the one for the guy who shouldn't even be in the set, seeing as he resigned six and a half months before the set was released:

#183

I'm feeling a little melancholy about this post, as this is probably the last new set I'm going to get via ZenMarket.  Ryan has a few sets for me that he'll probably ship next month but, otherwise, this was it.  I'm glad it was a good set to end my run with ZenMarket with.

I put the link earlier in the post but I'll repeat it here - as always, you can see all the cards (including inserts and parallels) over at Jambalaya.