By: William Robinson
Last week Topps/Fanatics released their flagship product for 2024 and I wanted to give myself a week or so with it before I wrote my review. By the writing of this review I have only opened retail product thus far but soon will open up my annual jumbo box of Series 1. That being said, this product has been very interesting to me thus far.
The design for the front of the cards is fresh and bold. It has a dark top border which should make getting Gem Mint copies difficult. The Team name is in neon and the player’s name is large and easy to read. The pictures are crisp and entertaining and for the flagship product the pictures in this set are easily the best pictures that they have featured for many years.
There are many formats to choose from when it comes to purchasing this product and each format has their own chase cards or variants. You can buy this product in hobby format as well as retail and there are fanatics exclusive boxes that can be purchased from their website. With each of these different variations and product varieties it is going to be nearly impossible to collect a rainbow of any particular player. Sufficed to say that if someone is trying to buy them all it’s going to be quite expensive.
The cards are a bit more expensive too this year. The base set is now 350 cards, and each product comes with less cards in it than previous years. Each pack contains 12 cards in a regular box. Hobby boxes have 24 packs, 7 packs in a blaster box and mega boxes have 16 packs. Jumbo boxes have 40 cards per pack and 10 packs per box. As of the writing of this review blaster boxes are 24.99, hanger boxes are 14.99, fat packs are 8.00 and Hobby boxes are 90 and Jumbos about 190. I have opened a mega box, 5 blaster boxes, 5 hanger boxes and 5 fat packs and still do not have a set.
The inserts for this set are pretty decent this year as well. In every pack of retail are the Stars of the MLB. This makes them the most common cards that you can find for this set and as a collector I know that I have gotten quite sick of them. Still their design is better than last years. These come in a chrome variation that is more rare and thus much more collectable.
The other returning inserts include Home Run Challenge, Heavy Lumber, and Hometown Heroes. The Heavy Lumber inserts and Hometown Heroes inserts are only found one per case. Their design was tweaked this year but they along with Home Run Challenge cards aren’t dramatically altered for this year.
The other inserts that are new to this set include: 2023 All Topps Team, Superstar Blueprint, Grand Gamers, 2023 Greatest Hits, 1989 35th anniversary cards and Celebration of the Kid. I’ll be honest I’m not a huge fan of these insert sets. They look very bland and generic. The best looking of the insets is the All Topps Team and even then, they aren’t something that I’d chase after. I’m not certain why there is an insert set dedicated to Ken Griffey Jr. this year, but it feels really generic, and the pictures aren’t even very good. They continue the theme of an insert based on the cards of 35 years ago and so this year it’s 1989 which again feels very generic and useless.
The Hit checklist is exhaustive. There are autographs from literally everyone in this set and so many of the autographs that you are going to pull aren’t going to be worth writing home about. There is only one manufactured relic this year that’s only inserted in jumbo hobby boxes I believe. It’s actually pretty nice looking and is rather rare so that makes them worth more.
The rest of the hit cards are game used relics which is kind of nice. Still though if you are paying 190 dollars for a jumbo box of these it’s very possible that your hits won’t be worth 20.00.
The other interesting quirk of this set are the chase cards. There are a lot of individual and interesting variations on cards. Each player again has a golden backed SSP card, as well as a team color variation card, each of which are case hits. There are stamped cards that are the “first card” variant of each rookie player as well which are very rare and represent the first Topps rookie card of each player. There are also really rare cards of Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto in their new uniforms and Kevin Hart stamped cards. So, there are some really rare stuff out there for people to chase if they get bored making a set.
Each hobby box and Jumbo hobby box also comes with two silver packs again which is a nice way to get some extra value in your boxes as each pack goes for about 20 bucks on the secondary market. I’ve had good luck with these in the past and have hit some nice autographs on them. There are also exclusive Easter cards that come in the blaster boxes in retail. These have replaced the manufactured patch card that came in them and I’m still not sure which one that I prefer. There were years that the patch cards were nice such as the Jackie Robinson cards or the American Flag ones and other ones that were pretty awful, but there are also so many variants that adding more feels like white noise.
So, in summary the cards look nice. The inserts are rather bland, and the hit cards are better and more frequent. There are more case hits this time around and because of that it feels like the odds of pulling a rare card are pretty high. That being said I think the value is better this year in this set than previous years and so it shouldn’t be something that sits around on the shelves too long. I’d give this product a solid B this year.