Each week over the past year our resident card expert Joe Lowry has given everyone on our Prospects Live Discord Baseball Card chat a heads up on what’s dropping in the Hobby. We’re now bringing those posts over to the main site to help keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time. This week we have one product being released: 2021 Bowman Draft 1st Edition. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week. ***Updated for info on Topps Japan NPB Flagship and Flagship Chrome upcoming releases
2021 Bowman Draft 1st Edition
2021 Bowman Draft 1st Edition is back for year two and was announced to the public on Tuesday, November 23rd as a product dropping on Topps’ website the following day, Wednesday, November 24th.
There appears to be two different configurations - a hobby box that went out to Local Card Shops and Online Retailers and a hobby box that Topps sold direct from their website. The LCS version of the hobby box was configured like we had seen previously - 24 packs with 10 cards each. Blowout was selling these for $550 a box pre-sale on Tuesday and sold out before the Wednesday drop. Topps online dropped their hobby configuration which was the first time we have seen this - instead of 24 packs, there were 50 packs and they were selling at $750 a box. They sold out in less than 30 minutes even with the high price point and limited to one box per account. Neither configuration guarantees a hit - autos are one in every 247 packs. Missing from the options to purchase was being able to buy single packs at $15 a pop online from Topps, which we have seen in the past three releases of Bowman and Bowman Draft 1st Edition products.
The design isn’t anything new - we’ve been seeing it all year in previous Bowman releases. In general, I’ve liked the design all year. The cards are paper based with foil parallels - the main difference from the full product release at the end of the year (or perhaps early next year) is that there is a 1st edition logo printed on the front of the card. The hard to hit autos are chrome, but according to the odds, these will only be base autos and not having colored parallels like we have seen in previous releases.
The checklist has not yet been released (Thanks Topps), but we can safely assume a majority of it will be made up of players from the 2021 MLB draft. I probably won’t revisit this when the checklist does finally make it out, but in general we will probably expect the highlights to be Marcelo Mayer, Brady House, Jack Leiter, and the number 1 pick, Henry Davis.
I bought 4 to 5 packs of this in the past direct from Topps as fun rips in the past and was disappointed the single pack option was removed. I get it from a logistical standpoint for Topps, but it still is disappointing for myself and I am guessing a majority of collectors. In general, the first to market cards from this product sell really well, but after the full product releases, these tend to come back down to earth. While they still tend to hold a bit of a premium, it really can depend on the player. I might end up with some via breaks or singles in the secondary market, but I was a bit turned off by Topps handling of the product and may just pass on it altogether.
2021 Topps Japan NPB Flagship
This one slipped past me last week - back on November 17th Topps announced their first Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) release. No specific release date was announced other than “scheduled to start shipping in early December”.
Referred to simply as Flagship, not much is known outside of price and parallels. At the moment all that is advertised is a 24 pack hobby box with no autos/relics listed. I am not sure if this will change, but in year 1 in a rushed product, I don’t expect this to happen and will be pleasantly surprised if we do get autos or relics. The price point is 13,200 Yen, which translates to just over $115 currently.
The design follows suit with 2021 MLB flagship. Almost all base parallels are of the foil variety - un-numbered Gold Foil, Rainbow Foil to 150, Vintage Stock (not listed as a foil) to 99, Blue Foil to 50, Orange Foil to 25, Red Foil to 5, RayFoils as the 1/1. Not really sure what a RayFoil is, but interested to see them when they hit social media/eBay. We also get a throwback 1986 Topps design that we have seen in MLB Flagship with their own set of Foils somewhat similar to the base foils and an NPB Team Programs insert set. I have no idea what that will look like, but hopefully it’s fun stuff.
No checklist has been announced, but expect to probably see the majority of players in the NPB this year. The Topps Japan website is telling us to expect about 20 player per team, which would give us roughly 240 base cards (12 NPB teams). There may also be an outside chance at ex-NPB players as well to drive the product along the lines of Ichiro and Ohtani, but this is such a quick turnaround that something like this may not happen until next year.
Given that the Topps Japan is the exclusive online distributor of this product and at this time they only shipped domestically, it means international customers will have to either find a Japan parcel forwarder or purchase in the secondary market. Those are too many hoops to jump through for me and I will likely just grab aftermarket singles of the cool looking cards and the big name players like Yuki Yanagita, Tetsuto Yamada, Seiya Suzuki, Tomoyuki Sugano, Kodai Senga, etc.
2021 Topps Japan NPB Flagship Chrome
2021 Topps Japan NPB Flagship Chrome was not officially announced on the Topps Japan twitter account like regular NPB Flagship, but it is showing up on their website. Literally the only difference is the price and the lack of description/information on parallels and even if/what the insert sets are. The price point is 15,840 Yen which translates to just under $140 currently.