Topps Now Samurai Japan Cards - 2024 Premier 12

Ever since Topps started doing Topps Now cards for the Samurai Japan teams - both individual cards and team sets - I wondered what they'd do for the 2024 Premier 12 squad.  What I kind of expected that they'd do was pretty much what they had done previously - 8-16 (probably 16) individual Topps Now cards plus a 28-30 card team set.  

However, it became quickly apparent last November that Topps was upping the number of individual cards Topps Now cards for this tournament.  The initial batch of cards on Topps' Japanese website included seven cards that only covered the team's first two games of the tournament.  Since Japan was reasonably expected to play nine games in total, 3 1/2 cards per game would result in something like 32 cards, twice as many as had been issued for any other Samurai Japan incarnation.

I also discovered that there'd been six (well, five really - more about that in a minute) Topps Now Samurai Japan card issued for a couple games the team played against the Czech Republic as a warm up just before the tournament that must have only been available on-line for about ten minutes because I never saw them.  Between the disappointment that there were six cards I missed and not wanting to spend a fortune,  I decided that I wasn't going to get all of them this time.  It was just too much money to put out, especially since I figured there'd be a full team set coming out by the end of the year.  So I asked Ryan to order specific cards for me - I pretty much picked one card per game - and I waited for Topps to offer the team set.

Except that Topps never offered the team set.  I don't know if they decided not to issue the team set because Samurai Japan didn't win the tournament or, more likely, they ran out of time before their license to do the carsd expired, but, either way, there wasn't going to be a team set.

Since I didn't realize there'd be no team set until after the individual cards weren't available anymore, I was kind of stuck.  I'd have to start looking for the cards on the secondary market.

That's worked out better than I expected.  It helped that Topps didn't issue quite as many cards for the tournament as I had feared - only 22 in all.  Ryan had ordered nine of them directly from Topps and I've found another ten of them (that Ryan picked up for me) so I'm only missing three of them.  I've also managed to get one of the cards for the games against the Czech Republic - there's only five of them as it appears that one of the cards (#11) was never issued,

OK, that was a lot of prelude to get to the cards themselves.  They're basically the standard Japanese Topps Now cards - nice photos on the front, next to nothing information on the back.  Each card was selling for 1342 yen ($8.72) if you were in Japan but only 1220 yen ($7.92) if you were in the States (since you don't have to pay taxes on it).  Of course, if you're in the States, you had to pay for shipping and that was at least 4000 yen or about $26.  The cards are numbered in continuation of the individual cards issued for the "Global Games" against Team Euro in March of 2024.  Those cards were numbers 1 through 8, the Czech Republic games were cards 9 through 14 and the Premier cards were numbers 15 to 36.

Here are the cards I have:

#9

#15

#16

#17

#19

#20

#22

#23

#24

#25

#26

#27

#28

#29

#30

#32

#33

#34

#35

#36

I think the 22 Premier 12 cards cover 19 of the 28 players on the roster.  The nine missing players are Takahisa Hayakawa, Ryoya Kurihara, Masayuki Kuwahara, Taisei Ota, Keito Sano, Sora Suzuki, Ryosuke Tatsumi, Shosei Togo and Rikuto Yokoyama.  Five of those players - Hayakawa, Kuwahara, Sano, Tatsumi and Togo appear in the Czech Republic cards.

I was kind of surprised that the cards didn't have the Premier 12 logo on them, especially since the 2023 Asia Professional Baseball Championship cards had had the logo for that tournament on them.  I guess that means that these aren't "official" Premier 12 cards.

As I mentioned earlier, the card backs have the usual very little information on them.  All they have is the opponent, date and location of the game, along with which section of the tournament the game occurred - "Opening Round", "Super Round" or "Finals".  For whatever reason, as usual Topps didn't include the score of the game.  Here's the back of Hiroto Saiki's card (#23) as an example:

Jambalaya has all these cards up on their website although it's a bit confusing - they use the same page for all 28 of these cards, all eight of the "Global Games" cards and the 30 card "Global Games" team set.

Like I said yesterday, I think the Topps Now Samurai Japan cards are one of the few things that Topps has done well in Japan.  I just wish I'd known they weren't going to do the team set in time to have ordered all these cards (and known the Czech Republic cards were there).  I know I'll eventually find the rest of them, though.