Sunday, December 28, 2025

2025 In Review - Topps

It was pretty much business as usual for Topps with their NPB products in 2025.  For the third straight year, they issued four sets but they managed to spread them out a little more during the year rather than bunch almost all of them at the end of the year like they did in 2024.

They issued their flagship "NPB" set in June.  Their next set. "Stadium Club NPB", was published in September.  "NPB Chrome" followed in October and "Finest NPB" came out in November.  All four sets had base sets of 216 cards although I don't believe that the same players appeared in all four sets.

This is the fifth year that Topps has done cards for the NPB market and they've done different sets each year.  They've issued a total of 17 sets over that time - two in 2021, three in 2022, and four each in 2023, 2024 and 2025.  They've done the "flagship" "NPB" set each year as well as the "NPB Chrome" set.  The "Chrome" set has changed somewhat over the years as the first two years it was simply an ugly parallel version of the "NPB" set but since 2023 has been a completely different set with different photos and checklist.  Three other sets have only had two editions - "Bowman NPB" (2022-23), "206 NPB" (2023-24) and "Stadium Club NPB" (2024-25).  "Finest NPB" so far has only had the 2025 edition.  

For the second year, Topps issued Topps Now cards for NPB teams.  I have been unable to determine, however, how many of the teams they did the cards for or even how many cards they issued this year.  Topps' Japanese website - on the rare occasions where it doesn't automatically redirect me to the US one - doesn't appear to have any archive information about what cards they've issued easily available.

Topps apparently lost the license to do Samurai Japan cards at the beginning of the year as both Epoch and Bushiroad did Samurai Japan related sets but they apparently regained the license towards the end of the year.  They issued six Topps Now cards for the team that played a couple friendly matches against Korea in November.

No comments: