Free Samples of 2019 Series 1

Sorry, not giving them out.  Just reviewing some that I got.

Inspired by a couple first day posts about the new Topps series, and the fact that I was in the right part of town the other evening, I made a quick Target run to get a taste.  At first glance, I was on the fence about the base design, and am (still) worried about the quality and quantity of the inserts.  But luckily, I had a couple Target gift cards from some tech support I did a while back.  Those set me up for three hanger boxes, which (if I have the math right), are the best deal as far as price-per-card among the retail package offerings.  So my net cost for these was 31 cents!

My Tarzhay had three hooks of these.  Two were labeled with the Gleyber Highlights cards and one just had the Home Run contest cards line.

I wanted nothing to do with Glee boy, so I opted for three off the other hook, and I'm glad I did.

I've heard the ratios of inserts to every pack are down this year.  Then I remembered, there are no packs in these hangers.

I'm not going to scan a bunch of the base cards.  You've seen them several places already by now, I'm sure.  Not sure what the rule is for designating the first card you see in a given year.  O'Hearn was on top of the first wrapped stack, but I saw the bottom of the stack first, so Pivetta was the initial name I read.  Can we get a ruling from the commish? ;)

Best part about it - No doubles!  Three consecutive boxes on the same hook actually yielded a consistent stream of different singles!

Anyway, the parallels I pulled were all foils.  I seem to be developing a knack to pull Acuñas.  There is a nice guide page to all the different parallels here.

There he is again!  And super bonus ~ I pulled the only '84 I would have chased after, Bo Jackson!  Kershaw is a good name too.  Night Owl?

So this was a bit of an Acuña hot box...

With the base card rounding out the "trifecta".

A couple of the shameless promo cards.  "Hey kids, here's what you missed if you're all about just the superstar hype machine!  Hope you can contribute to the revenue stream this year!!"  At least there's only ten of them.  Which is in stark contrast to...

...these really decent looking 150th Anniversary tribute cards.  Unfortunately, there are, of course, 150 of them.  As if the past few years' worth of 100-100-50 insert series weren't bloated enough.  Now we have an excuse to issue them all at once!  Or, are they going to total up 450 by the end of the year?

The most horrible development this year is that there appear to be less inserts per pack(age).  But there are still a huge number of total inserts issued.  530 to be exact (thanks ArpSmith for the math and the list).  They break down like this:

150 Years of Baseball – 150 cards

’84 Topps Throwbacks – 100 cards 
(3rd annual incursion on Heritage and Archives)

Stars of the Game – 100 cards  (Annual star player worship set)

Iconic Card Reprints – 50 cards  (Annual triple redundant recycling set)

Cactus League Greats – 30 cards (retail)

Grapefruit Leage Greats – 30 cards (retail)

Evolution – 25 cards

Greatness Returns – 25 cards

Revolution of the Game – 10 cards  (Now here are some interesting subjects!)

’18 Topps Now Review – 10 cards  ('nuff said)

Now granted, they DID cut down on a few sets.  The retail spring training ones are only 30, and the last third of the list are 25 or 10 - where most of them should be.  And the total counts are down to 2008-2009 numbers, if we were talking about the WHOLE YEAR.  It is quite possible that if they repeat the '84s and add on to the 150ths or StarOTG, they may issue more total inserts than ever!  How can you justify putting less of them in packs?

(Update: Sounds like they will, in fact be issuing 150 more 150ths for series two.  And they really only reduced two insert sets by 5 cards compared to last year.)

C'mon Topps, we meant there are too many inserts TOTAL TO GET.  Not that there were TOO MANY IN A PACK!

As far as the base set goes, I'm OK with the design in general.  Some aspects are the same old thing, and some are improvements.  Most of them are somewhere in between.  Let's see what the net score is if we give points for good things and take them away for bad.

+5 for Composition - I really like that the photos "break" the design elements.  Do more of this!

+1 for League Leaders - OK, so ya got the label on the front.  It's distinctive, but still kinda blends in with all the base cards.  Every journey begins with the first step, I guess.  League leaders should be multi-player cards, period.

+2 for World Series - OK, this is better.  Nice official logo and multi-color text below the stripe.  Maybe change the standard name to a headline about the game next time.  But good job.

-1 for Last Name First - The backwards name is a little off putting, but not an OCD dealbreaker.  Maybe if they did something like this, so you read front to back instead of top to bottom.  Shades of Stadium Club.

-3 for Massive Trademark symbols -  This is totally unnecessary and just shows amateurism at PhotoShop.  It's a simple font size adjustment.  Like this...

There, aesthetically pleasing and all legal too.

Let's go ahead and throw in +2 for Good Collation - at least in the hanger boxes that I got, I didn't duplicate any cards.   Which is rare.

Plus ten and minus four comes to a net gain of six points.  So 2019 base is generally a step forward from previous years.  Still flawed and bloated, I'm probably going to fill my base set and see how easy some of the smaller inserts are, and then call it a year.  I'm not seeing too many other potential builds this year so far.