While this release often seems to offer more of the same, this year Topps changed it up a little bit. Better? That remains to be seen, but it’s different. For one, they offer relics containing pieces of real musical instruments. Another change we see this year, is rather than the long standing size of the set, they’ve increased the 50 card SPs at the end, to a whopping 100 SPs, taking the complete set up to 400 total cards.
The box format is still the same as it has been for years, with 24 packs containing 8 cards each. A box includes three hits, consisting of autographs, relics, rip cards, printing plats, and more.
Once again, a normal summer release finds itself coming out well after the season has ended. There isn’t really much difference year to year in this product. Even the base design is very similar, due to the nature of it all being based on the original set from the late 1800s.
The base set features 300 cards, with an additional 50 SPs, although they’re not particularly rare compared to other releases. There is one full size parallel, but the bulk of the parallels come in tobacco sized cards, with differing fronts or backs. A box contains 24 packs of 8 cards, featuring three advertised hits.
This box contained:
125 Base (41.7% of 300 card set) 12 Base SP (24% of 50 card SP set) 10 Base Mini Parallels 5 Base Mini Allen & Ginter Back Parallels 2 Base Mini Black Border Parallels 11 Banner Season 2 Famous Rivals 2 Get That Bread 3 It’s Your Special Day 4 Pitching a Gem 2 What’s Cookin’? 1 Baseball Lexicon 1 Inside the Park 1 Mini Ducks 1 2006 A&G Rookie Design Variation 1 Time Out! 1 What a Steal! 1 Cabinet Boxloader Francisco Lindor 1 Full Sized Relics A Jarren Duran 1 Full Sized Relics B Gerrit Cole 1 Rip Card Eloy Jimenez
As with many releases during the pandemic times, this one got pushed back a little bit into an August release. It has the now standard configuration with 300 base cards and 50 additional base SPs. This is a combination of current and retired baseball stars, along with various other pop culture people from across the board. This year feels a little bit light on the random inclusions compared to last year, but they’re still present.
A box contains 24 packs of 8 cards, with an additional box topper. The box advertises three hits, consisting of autographs, relics, and more.
This set faced a big delay due to the pandemic shut downs. Normally, this set would be released in July, but this year it finally hit stores in mid September. The great card rush is still going on, but it remains to be seen how that will affect this release. While this is a heavy hit product, with three per hobby box, there is a mix of baseball players past and present, and many other pop culture subjects. It’s not a set for everyone.
It can have wide spread appeal, because you can find some subjects that would normally not get cardboard treatment. That same feature can turn off baseball purists, though. It doesn’t get the same sort of attention as other releases, despite the large number of hits, because you primarily see a lot of lower end relics. The biggest current rookie prize is Luis Robert, and he has autographs in this product, but it doesn’t seem to be driving the treasure hunters like in other products.
The base set contains 300 cards, with an additional 50 short prints running 301-350. There are a few regular parallels, with most of the parallels in mini card form. We see a few baseball related inserts sets, but then also some random inserts such as “Where Monsters Live” and “Citadels & Strongholds”. Overall, it’s a fun set as a throwback to a late 1800s set.
A box contains 24 packs of 8 cards, and advertises 3 hits per box.
This is one of my favorite every year. I like the baseball focus, but with the inclusion of a lot of randomness. It feels like there is a little bit less of that this time around. Dreams of Blue Ribbons is a step in that direction, but the rest seem fairly normal.
This year, there were apparently some distribution problems. While many people still received the product on release day, it took until the following Monday for me to be able to get it. While waiting for it to arrive, another product was brought to my attention that I may have to look at. It seems it has a lot of what I like about Allen & Ginter, but I’ll have to see for myself.