The release of 2018 Topps series 1 heralds the first signs of spring and the coming of spring training.  After a long cold off season, it’s the first sign of return of baseball.  I’m not a big fan of the recent designs, and this year doesn’t do much to change that opinion.  Again, the design, with no borders, doesn’t really feel like a flagship Topps set to me, and I can only see a tongue sticking out by the logo now.

It’s not a bad set by any means, it just doesn’t feel right to me.   Perhaps one of the biggest surprises to me, is the lack of buybacks in the product.  They have become a staple over the last few years, and almost seem to stick out in their absence.

Once again, there are a large number of SP and SSPs mixed in.  The odds for a lot of the numbered inserts seems much tougher than normal, pointing to a large increase in production.  That’s been a concern as the hobby begins recovering from Judgemania last year.

Continue reading 2018 Topps Series 1 Jumbo Hobby Box Break →

This is a pretty standard end of the season release. It captures many of the late season acquisitions, but it also misses the many of the post deadline deals. It seemed like this year, there were many significant post waiver deadline deals, so you can’t really blame the set for missing those. They have to draw the line somewhere, or risk being released long after the season is over.

The set features 300 cards, and many of the normal inserts and parallels. A Jumbo box features 10 packs of 50 cards each, with three guaranteed hits.

This box contained:

Continue reading 2017 Topps Update Jumbo Hobby Box Break →

If you liked series one, series two brings you more of the same, in some cases much more. We get a continuation of series one, with numbers 351-700. The usual assortment of parallels are back, but we also get a bit of a throwback for the SP variations. Instead of just image variations, we also see the return of old time player variations.

Many of the insert sets are continued in this series, including 1987 Topps, First Pitch, MLB Network, and Salute. The First Pitch set is at least a reasonable size. I can’t really say the same about the 1987 and Salute sets. They are each 100 cards, after 100 cards from series one, as well. At ten per box, those sets would take almost two cases to pull, which seems a bit extreme to me.

During the initial release, hobby stores also offered two additional 1987 Topps Chrome packs for each sealed box purchase.

This box contained my first 1/1 autograph, which was rather surprising to me. It contained:

Continue reading 2017 Topps Series 2 Jumbo Hobby Box Break →