The 2015 release represents the tenth year of Topps’ Allen & Ginter offering, and they plan to celebrate it. Aside from the normal assortment of baseball players, other sport stars, and pop culture figures, buyback cards from the previous nine years are featured, as well. It does seem a little bit odd to pull a one year old buyback card, paying tribute to the history of the set, which itself is paying tribute to the history of the vintage set.
The set itself is missing a fairly large part of the recent releases, and that is retired players. It gives the set a different feel. It’s possible the use of retired players was being a bit over done in recent years, when a player would get more modern cards than he ever did during his career, though. Also gone, are the SP cards, which had been a staple of the release. In a year that SPs took on a very very short print definition in Archives, they do away with some of the more accessible SPs from Allen & Ginter.
The box advertises 24 packs, with 8 cards per pack, including 3 hits per box.
This box contained
134 Base (38.2% of set)
11 Base Mini
5 Mini Allen & Ginter
3 Mini Black Border
1 Mini Flag Back
2 First Ladies
1 Birds of Prey
1 Hoist the Black Flag
12 Starting Point
4 Great Scott
3 Ancient Armory
2 Menagerie of the Mind
2 What Once Would Be
1 What Once Was Believed
1 10th Anniversary Issue 2009 Buyback 187 Brett Myers
1 10th Anniversary Issue 2010 Buyback 260 Chris Young
1 10th Anniversary Issue 2014 Buyback Mini Allen & Ginter 305 Jayson Werth
1 Full Size Relic A Matt Carpenter
1 Full Size Relic B David Ortiz
1 Autograph Buck 65
I think Topps realizes that they need to make Ginter eclectic with their bizarre auto checklist as they have in the past and can t get by on the other quality of the product as they did last year.
Allen and ginter can be much better cause the big hits if your lucky are drying up and leaving the product simple and plain to end up in the box you never look at in storage.