News broke today that Topps has renewed their license with NPB for 2022. The announcement says that "Topps plans to launch several new NPB products throughout 2022" but, like the announcement of their initial agreement last October, there aren't any actual details on what they'll release. The October announcement statement said "Topps will launch several products in 2021 to be sold in select retail locations throughout Japan starting in Q4" and it turned out that "several" equalled "two".
My expectation at this point is that Topps will at least do another "NPB" set using the same design as their flagship MLB design this year as well as a "Chrome" version. After that, your guess is as good as mine about whether they'll do anything else and what that anything else might look like. My hope is that this year's set will be better than last year's, if for no other reason than the design of this year's MLB flagship set is much more attractive than last year's. And hopefully they'll have time to make an effort to make the backs somewhat interesting.
One last thing - I had mentioned last month that Topps' Japanese website was no longer accessible from outside Japan. That apparently has changed as I can get there from the US without a VPN again. They still do not ship outside of Japan however.
1 comment:
I'm glad they don't ship outside of Japan. Collectors in Japan should be able to get first crack at these products instead of dealing with foreign flippers.
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