There is no stronger motivation to return to blogging after a couple of months hiatus than the desire to complain about something. Fortuitously the purchase of a box of 2022 Topps NPB has provided me with a very good opportunity to validate that hypothesis.
It was my son's birthday this week and having almost completed the Calbee set this year one bag of chips at a time together I thought I'd get him a box of cards we could rip and try to put the set together in one go. I found boxes of both Topps and BBM on Yahoo Auctions and decided to give the Topps one a try. I picked it up almost a month ago and set it aside until the big day.
My son had fun opening the packs. That is almost the only nice thing that I can say about this set. I could say the same about packs of 1991 Donruss or pretty much any other set for that matter so....yeah.
This set just sucks so bad I don't know where to start. So I'll start with the box itself. That is an ugly, unimaginatively designed box. The packs inside, which I don't have a photo of handy, are even more boring to look at. I remember what Topps boxes were like in the 80s - very colorful designs with pictures of cards of the stars on them. They made you really want to buy the packs. To further entice you they even made the boxes themselves out of cards, which was an ingenious idea.
2022 Topps NPB basically looks like a carton of cigarettes sold in a country with very strict plain packaging laws. I almost expected to see a giant warning about lung cancer with a scary picture of a damaged lung on the side. This is just as god awful a package design as you can get.
But what about the cards themselves? Well....
They almost exactly copied the 2022 MLB Topps design except that they didn't put the team logo where the team logo is supposed to go. Kind of dull but not awful. I give them points for having slightly better photography than Calbee, which is not a high standard.
The backs though just make my blood boil:
What the F is this? Is this a joke? This is a joke right? Tell me this is a joke. This can't not be a joke, so it must be a joke.
My favorite part of the joke is where they could only fit two lines of stats (2021 and career) at the very bottom because they needed to devote the rest of the card back to....nothing! Literally empty space with nothing but a tiny team logo taking up about 15% of it.
This is so gratuitously awful I almost have to ask if mischievous vandals might have broken into the Topps offices and replaced whatever the real design for the card backs was with this....this....this.....this..... (voice from the guy sitting next to me as I type this: "Tomfoolery"?) TOMFOOLERY, yes, thank you.
Oh and you know what the insert cards are? These same garbage cards but with different colored borders! And a retro throwback subset using the 1958 Topps design, perhaps chosen because that is the dullest one that could be copied with the least amount of effort possible. No autographed cards or anything like that of course.
This set just sucks so bad I actually feel kind of guilty about having insulted my first born child by having made a gift of these to him. I hope one day when he is old enough to appreciate how bad these cards are that he will forgive me.
Anyway, I guess I got what I paid for. This set was released last month with a suggested retail price of 13,200 Yen per box. I paid 8,000 for this one on Yahoo Auctions, and there are plenty available to be had at around that price. Word seems to be getting around about how much these suck. Good. I hope this post will contribute to that. Be forewarned: 2022 Topps NPB is the worst set of baseball cards I've seen in......I don't know how long but a while.
For Christmas, I'll be getting my son a box of 2022 BBM.
13,200 yen for a set without autographs. Trash.
ReplyDeleteYup. Its weird, you'd expect some start up company thats never put out a set before to suck this bad, but Topps doesn't really have any excuse for this garbage.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize until I saw your post that Topps didn't bother with the biographical data (birthdate, height, weight, etc) for the managers on the backs of their cards. That black box just has the name of the team.
ReplyDeleteI could almost forgive the horrible backs on last year's cards because the set was kind of rushed out. No such excuse this year.
I'm hoping to do my post on the set next week - it'll pretty much echo what both you and Kenny have said. The one positive thing I'll say that I think their photo selection is probably the best of BBM, Calbee and Epoch.
And "Happy Birthday!" to your son!
DeleteYeah, on looking through the whole set I do agree that the photography is decent, much better than Calbee (haven't seen BBM or Epoch, though I bought a box of BBM Series 1 for Christmas and will have a look!)
DeleteAnd exactly - the fact that this is their second year at it yet this blatant laziness persists is what makes me so mad. If they had just filled the back with full career statistics like with the MLB set I wouldn't have even noticed, but this weird decision to only have two lines of stats and then leave the rest of the card back more or less blank is just so in-you-face it is hard not to be irritated by it.
And thanks for the happy birthday wishes. Actually despite my complaints about the set, we did have fun with it.
Even so, I'd say that if your son enjoys them, then it was well worth the expense.
ReplyDeleteThat is very true. I don't regret the purchase and we did have fun opening them up and putting the set together (bought an album with pages for that).
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