When Topps initially announced their license with NPB about a year and a half ago, I said that I thought the most interesting thing they could do would be to use their classic card designs, maybe doing an Archives or Heritage style set. While they have yet to do a full scale set like that, both of their NPB "flagship" sets have featured an insert set using one of their old card designs (and the Chrome sets have had ugly Chrome versions of the same insert cards).
For their first set in 2021 they included a 24 card (2 cards per team) insert set that used the 1986 design. Well, it's the 1986 design with a slight modification - they added a white square with the team's logo in it to the lower right corner of each card. I really liked how these turned out and I decided to pick up all 24 of them. Here they all are:
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| #86-LM |
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| #86-SN |
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| #86-Tk |
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| #86-YO |
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| #86-KS |
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| #86-YUY |
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| #86-KA |
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| #86-RU |
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| #86-MM |
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| #86-SS |
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| #86-KK |
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| #86-NU |
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| #86-YYA |
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| #86-MY |
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| #86-SG |
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| #86-KT |
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| #86-HA |
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| #86-MT |
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| #86-MMU |
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| #86-TY |
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| #86-KS |
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| #86-YY |
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| #86-KO |
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| #86-HS |
I thought Topps did a pretty good job with these. The photos all look like ones I could have expected to see on an MLB Topps card from 1986. My one complaint about the fronts is that I don't understand why the Eagles cards had to say "Rakuten Eagles" on them - it looks really cramped.
The backs are the standard Topps NPB "least amount of effort" backs but at least they made them look a little like the backs of the original.
For last year's set they included another 24 card insert set that used the 1958 card design. They got even closer to the original front design with these cards - as far as I can tell, the main difference is the inclusion of a "Topps' logo in the lower left corner. When I heard that Topps was doing 1958 style cards, I wondered if they'd actually get posed shots like they had had on the original cards or if they'd simply superimpose an action shot against a colored background (kind of like BBM's "Cross-Whatever" cards"). I was pleased to see that they did the former but they did it in the most monotonous way possible. The original set had a mixture of head shots of the players as well as them posing with bats or in fielding positions. For these cards they just did head shots of the players. I found that just a little too boring to get more than a couple cards from the insert set:
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| #58-5 |
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| #58-16 |
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| #58-19 |
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| #58-24 |
They made a slight improvement of the backs - they included cartoon figures similar to how the cartoons on the back of the original 1958 cards looked like. But the cartoons are just generic and don't tell any story about the player on the card. It looks like there's two different sets of cartoons - one for batters and one for pitchers. Here's the backs of Murakami and Sugano's cards so you can see what I'm talking about:
It looks like this year's set will have an insert set using the 2001 design. It'll be interesting to see how it looks.
