2021 Topps NPB set

I wasn't sure I was going to buy the Topps NPB set when it came out in early December but I was able to track a set down for $35-ish so I picked it up.  It's just the base set - no inserts and no parallels.  The base set contains 216 cards split up evenly among the 12 teams (18 cards per team).  There are no subsets or checklist cards.

I had mixed feelings about this set before I got it and now that I have it in hand...I still have mixed feelings.  As I've mentioned before, the cards use a similar design to Topps' MLB cards this year, a design I personally think was pretty ugly.  And to paraphrase Night Owl Cards' comments about the MLB card design from almost a year ago - WHY THE HELL IS THE PLAYER'S NAME SO G*D D*MN SMALL!  I also like the photos on my baseball cards un-retouched and most of these appear to have had some sort of processing done to them.  And the less said about the card backs, the better.

But I have to say, the photo selection is excellent.  There's a much wider variety of poses than just the standard "batters batting, pitchers pitching and catchers catching" ones - a lot of "fielders fielding" and "base runners running" as well.  And there's a lot of more interesting versions of the "batters batting, pitchers pitching and catchers catching" poses as well.  Topps also had many more horizontally oriented cards than BBM, Epoch or Calbee did.  If the card design had borderless photos and the photos were left untouched, I could really fall in love with this set.  Even with the player's names being almost unreadable.

The player selection is a little odd.  With only 18 players per team, you'd think that Topps would have concentrated on picking most of the main players for each team and maybe a top rookie (i.e. 2020 draft pick) or two.  But no, Topps went the same direction as BBM's and Epoch's flagship sets and included ALL the 2020 draft picks for over half the teams (Marines, Dragons, Tigers, Carp, Buffaloes, Lions and Swallows).  There were 74 players taken in the 2020 draft (non-ikusei portion) and 60 of them appear in this set.  That's about 28% of the whole set.  I've made fun of BBM for including all the draft picks in their 1st Version sets but since those sets are larger, it's not quite as big of a deal.  Those 74 rookies this year accounted for about 23% of the 324 1st Version player cards (or really 24% of the non-manager cards) and about 17% of the 432 cards in Epoch's NPB set (or 18% of the non-manager cards).  

With all those rookies, there's a number of players who you might have expected to find in this set but don't.  Probably the biggest names are Kenta Imamiya, Ukyo Shuto, Shintaro Fujinami, Robert Suarez, Yuma Mune and Shuta Tonosaki.  Surprisingly there are 12 players who Topps included who are not in BBM's flagship sets this year - probably the biggest names are Wladimir Balentien and Chihiro Kaneko.

OK, enough talk - here's a card from each team:

#123

#76

#25

#143

#33

#165

#11

#71

#82

#121

#62

#191

As always, you can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.

One thing that I'm very curious about at this point is will there be any other NPB sets from Topps this year.  They are supposedly issuing a Chrome version of this set but it's been delayed since December and there's currently no release date available.  And what's really odd is that Topps' Japanese web site is no longer listing their NPB products.  The web pages for both this set and the Chrome set have been taken off line - if you try to access them you get a 404 "page not found" error.  Looking back at the original press release from the beginning of October where Topps announced that they had gotten a license to produce NPB cards, it hard to miss that it specifically mentions a "2021 licensing agreement" and that Topps would be issuing "several products in 2021" (emphasis mine in both quotes).  It sounds like the license was ONLY for 2021 and now that Fanatics has acquired Topps, it's probably an open question about whether or not Topps will attempt to acquire a new license.  This may end up being just an interesting one-off.