Each week over the past year our resident card expert Joe Lowry has given everyone on our Prospects Live Discord Baseball Card chat a heads up on what’s dropping in the Hobby. We’re now bringing those posts over to the main site to help keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time. This week we have two products being released: 2021 Topps Stadium Club Chrome and 2021 Onyx Vintage Extended Series (Delayed Again to 12/1). For 2021 Onyx Vintage Extended Series, see the TWiBC post from a few weeks ago. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week. ***Updated for the Topps 582 Montgomery Club renewals and new membership sale and Onyx Vintage Extended Series delay AGAIN.
2021 Topps Stadium Club Chrome
2021 Topps Stadium Club Chrome is scheduled to release on Wednesday, November 17th and is the chrome version of the lower tier Stadium Club product.
There is one hobby configuration - a regular Hobby Box which guarantees one auto per box. They are going for about $150 pre-sale at the moment. Last year, Topps sold these direct from their website for $75 and they sold out pretty much immediately. I expect a healthy increase this year and wouldn’t be surprised to see it north of $100 direct from Topps. There should also be retail formats as we saw blaster boxes in 2020.
The design for the base cards is all about the photography, and essentially is what you saw earlier in the year with 2021 Stadium Club. The main difference is that you will find a different set of inserts outside of the Virtual Reality insert which we already saw. Last year was the first iteration of Stadium Club Chrome and it seemed somewhat redundant as there are Chrome inserts in the base Stadium Club product. And indeed, there re-used a lot of the photos from the chrome inserts and the base Stadium Club Chrome version, which caused a lot of confusion when buying singles in the after market. I really hope that they choose different photos this year for players with chrome inserts in the base Stadium Club release and the base cards in Stadium Club Chrome. Let’s say I am not holding my breath on this though. A final note is that there was a lot of chrome dimpling in the 2020 Stadium Club Chrome release and this is another thing I hope they iron out in year two of the release. It was almost like a feature and not a bug. Not holding my breath on that being done better and all that again.
The checklist is very similar to the base 2021 Stadium Club release. Last year they essentially took the base checklist of 300 cards and then tacked on another 100 players to it and they did the same in year two - have to find some way to feed the print run monster. The auto check list last year was not identical - there were some similarities, but also some differences, and there were a LOT of autos in the Chrome product. This year, it looks like they have cut down the auto checklist. It looks to be very heavily rookie-focused with a sprinkling of the big names like Trout, Vladdy, Acuna, Soto, etc and a few other vets like Kyle Lewis and Luke Voit. Most likely those big name guys will be significantly short printed and this will feel very much like 2021 Topps Chrome. While we can chase Kelenic, Hayes, Mountcastle, Carlson, etc., there will be a heavy dose of Marchan, Jahmai Jones, Apostel, Clarke Schmidt, and other less desirable autos.
I love Stadium Club. Last year, I thought I was going to love Stadium Club Chrome. And if I had been able to get a box of it from Topps for $75, I think I would have been pretty happy. Unfortunately I did not defeat the bots that day and ended up only getting into a few breaks and buying the singles I wanted in the secondary market. The dimpling, lack of photo variation between the base chrome inserts and chrome releases, and inflated box prices (like most everything at this time last year), I ended up turning from hot to trot to lukewarm on the product. Given the lackluster performance of this year’s rookie class, I have a feeling this might not be as desired a product unless Topps sticks with a less than $100 price tag. At a cheaper price point, I probably will dip my toes in the water. But minus that, I am probably going to take the same approach as last year until I see any evidence of improvements from my main complaints in regard to the 2020 product.
582 Montgomery Club
Topps 582 Montgomery Club renewals and new memberships were announced at the beginning of the week. Renewals were announced for Tuesday, November 16th at a cost of $300. This is a $100 increase from previous years’ renewal cost of $200. New memberships went live with no pre-warning other than an email from Topps at the moment it went live on Wednesday, November 17th at a cost of $600. This is a $300 increase from last year’s price of $300 - quite a bit of sticker shock, but it still sold out in less than 15 minutes while Topps’ website was slammed with collectors and likely bots.
Membership to the 582 Montgomery Club gets you the following:
20-card Membership Set + Autograph
2 additional 20-card sets
1 additional 20-card set + Autograph
1 20-sticker set
582 Montgomery stamped 2022 Topps Baseball Complete Set
Exclusive access to purchase the 2022 Topps Brooklyn Collection
Access to Pre-sale windows on all sorts of online product offerings
Montgomery Club first option for renewal and renewal pricing the following year
While all of the products associated directly with the Montgomery Club are nice-to-haves and essentially the original intent of the membership, it has transformed into having pre-sale access to online products as the apple of the flipper’s eye. With the most recent 12 months of a membership, re-selling pre-sale products, depending on timing, would easily have netted you $3,000 - $5,000. A lot of that is driven by the Sapphire Edition products with Soccer, Formula 1, Baseball, and Garbage Pail Kids. It remains to be seen if it will have similar value with the next 12 months given that Formula 1 will no longer be a first year product coupled with the price hikes Topps is regularly doing across all of its products. But it’s still an easy bet to make in favor of this membership being a money maker for sealed flipping purposes. Since short-term flipping isn’t really why I am in the hobby, so I wasn’t interested in purchasing this myself if I could have even beaten the bots to be able do so.