Helping to keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time in the Baseball Card Hobby for the current week. Check out our Discord for more discussion on this and any other hobby chatter Prospects Live Discord.
This week we have three products being released: 2021 Bowman Draft, 2021 Bowman’s Best, and 2021 Transcendent Collection Baseball. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week - we probably should be seeing 2021 Topps Chrome Update hit retail shelves sometime in the near future perhaps.
2021 Bowman Draft
2021 Bowman Draft is scheduled to release on Friday, December 31st and is one of the three major Bowman prospect releases of the year.
There are four hobby configurations - Jumbo, Super Jumbo, Asia Edition and the new Lite configuration. Jumbo boxes guarantee 3 autographs and are running about $400 at the time of writing. Jumbos were sold directly from Topps last year for $310 - I expect we see them somewhere between that and $350 if they do sell them online. Super Jumbo boxes guarantee 5 autographs and are running about $600 and up. Asia Edition boxes are sold exclusively in, you guessed it, Asia and guarantee 1 autograph and exclusive parallels which most recently have essentially looked like the standard mojo parallel. No real insight on what these are currently being sold for. Lite boxes are new for 2021 and do not guarantee any hits, but do promise 5 exclusive Black & White RayWave Refractors. These boxes are going for around $150 at the moment. No retail formats typically are available for this product. ***Update - Topps sold Lite boxes for $90 list price starting on Monday, January 3rd.
The design is the standard Bowman layout we’ve seen in the spring Bowman Baseball release and the fall Bowman Chrome release for the base cards. No real need to dig into it again. Lava refractors as well as the Black & White RayWave refractors are new parallels for Draft that we have yet to see outside of the sell sheet in the case of the Lava and not at all in the case of the RayWave. In general, new parallels are fun and desirable, and I don’t see it being any different here. The main drawback is that it extends the print run, but that’s nothing new. For the inserts, we’ve seen a few previewed - Genesis, Invicta, and Class of 2021. Genesis has a very cosmic feel to it and I like the preview of it. Invicta is a dark and light geometric high-end looking insert that seems somewhat boring. Class of 2021 is the new year’s version of what we regularly see with the “Class of” inserts and is what it is. Looks like we are also getting the staple Franchise Futures insert. In addition we have the All-American game autographs that are rare hits, but unfortunately aren’t worth as much as one would expect given their rarity, and a Bowman Draft Night insert, which is likely features the players that were at the Draft itself.
The checklist has not been released as of this article being posted. However, with Bowman Draft 1st Edition already out, we have a good idea of at least who will have cards in the base set and some guys who will have autos. It looks like we will be getting just over 100 players from this year’s draft with 1st Bowman logos in the base set. Check out my 2021 Bowman Draft Product Preview coming out on release day as I go in depth on those players. Notable players not included are Khalil Watson, Jack Leiter, Colson Montgomery, Matt McLain, Trey Sweeney, Max Muncy, and Jordan Wicks.
Bowman Draft is a core prospect product and it is rare that I am completely uninterested in any of them. I tend to find at least a few players even in the worst releases that I want to own a few cards of, and this year will be no different. Given the price points, I don’t expect to be buying any form of hobby boxes. But I will likely partake in at least a few breaks and definitely will be buying singles of “my guys” - hopefully at prices that are palatable.
2021 Bowman’s Best
2021 Bowman’s Best is scheduled to release on Friday, December 31st and has gone from a lower tier product to closer to a mid tier product and that is all driven by price point.
There is only one format - a hobby box. It comes as a “master box” which contains two “mini boxes”. The hobby box, or master box, guarantees four autos - essentially two per mini box. They are currently running around $275 per hobby box. Two years ago, you could buy hobby boxes for about $125. Last year you could buy them for about $175 - $200 and Topps was selling them direct for $200. If Topps sells them direct, I think we are probably looking at about $250.
The design for Bowman’s Best is almost always one that doesn’t pull any punches. They truly go for it in one way or another. The base design this year is a very technical, almost graphical bar chart trending of colors with a rectangular-ish team pennant hanging down behind the player. The base auto is tamer, with a lot of bare space and a huge team logo on the card along with the player in the same pose twice. The inserts follow the same approach highlighted by the Heatwave Die-cut which looks really cool. The Masterpieces insert is a throwback to 60’s art taking some design queues from the Warhol type of color palette approach. The Rookie Craftsmanship insert is said to have some form of a puzzle element but not much more is known about it - will be an interesting thing to check out once it is in hand.
The checklist is yet to be released, but it typically is a mixture of prospects weighted towards the Bowman Draft prospects, rookies, and vets. The autos tend to focus on the prospects with lesser weighting to the rookies and even lesser weighting to the vets.
Bowman’s Best never really has the greatest resell value once the first to market rush is past. Given the significant increase in primary box prices, this may turn into a big drag on the product. Not really sure how releasing it the same day as Bowman Draft will impact Best this year, but if it does, it is probably a negative one. I used to enjoy getting access to cheaper shots at prospects I wanted in Best, but I didn’t go out of my way for it last year with the price increase and am even less interested this year with the price and timing conflict with Draft. It’s pretty much a pass for me this year even though I do like some of the designs.
2021 Topps Transcendent Collection
2021 Topps Transcendent Collection is scheduled to release on Friday, December 31st and is the super high-end release of all super-high end releases.
There is only one configuration - a “hobby” box that is in reality a safe-like briefcase. There are apparently only 95 boxes available this year, although in the past few years it was the nice round number of 100. It will be interesting to find out what, if any, is the reason for this. Strange times when you see a print run decrease. These boxes, given their exclusivity, are typically only found on Blowout or through non-public distribution channels and currently Blowout has them for just short of $27,000. That price point is in line with what we have seen from Blowout the past few years.
The design is again gold framed autos with a high-end, classic card border framing the player. The base complete set looks like a fancy black version of the 1982 Topps Baseball product. Various one of one cards are included - a deco variation auto that is somewhat of a mashup of the base and auto design, a 1957 Topps design superfractor auto, a through the years Topps throwback designs auto of either Ronald Acuña Jr. or Juan Soto or a dual auto of both, and the coveted cut auto.
The checklist is rookies, vets, and legends. In a checklist with 50 cards, it’s hard for there to be “losing” cards, but there will still be plenty of hits that won’t bring the return on investment simply because of how expensive the product is. Rod Carew, Dave Winfield, Jose Abreu, Cristian Pache, and others are just not going to make many collectors happy with those hits. And the most valuable part of the product is often not even the cards, but the VIP party invitation that comes included with the product. In years past, Blowout has offered to purchase these for up to five thousand dollars each. Sometimes the cut autos do exceed that value and some of the 1/1 autos of the most desirable players, but that isn’t as frequent as you would think.
For me, this is fun to watch but never participate in. I only have gotten cards in the aftermarket or through repacks and they were only from the base cards/sketch card sets. I probably could find the cheapest Transcendent auto for a reasonable price under $100 and buy it just to say I own one, but have not found the motivation to do it at any time in the past. I kind of doubt that changes any time soon.