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 don’t have any hobby products scheduled for release. On Tuesday, January 11th, 2021 Topps Chrome Update was posted for sale by Target on their website. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week - we probably should be seeing 2021 Bowman Heritage but it Topps has again not posted it for sale as promised. We may see other online releases with 2021 Topps Chrome Update Sapphire Edition and/or 2021 Bowman Draft Sapphire Edition.
2021 Topps Chrome Update
2021 Topps Chrome Update is conceptually the chrome version of Topps Update Series and went on sale on the Target website on Tuesday, January 11th.
There are various retail configurations and all are Target exclusives. The initial sale was only for the Mega Boxes and they are being sold for $50 a box. Last year they were going for $20. It appears the main difference is that the packs have gone from 7 packs in 2020 to 10 packs in 2021. With 4 cards per pack, that is an additional 12 cards per box. If we see the same formats as last year, we should expect to see hanger boxes and cello packs as well, but I have not seen any yet, so I don’t know if prices increases hit there as well. No hits are guaranteed in any format.
The design is what you’ve already come to see across all the Flagship and Flagship Chrome releases this year, so I don’t see a need to dig into further here. So far it seems like we will be getting the “70” die cut insert and the Black Gold insert. The Black Gold insert was a favorite of mine from Update Series and likely will be here as well.
The checklist is 100 base cards and is mostly a slimmed down version of Update Series with all of the Rookie Debut cards you could ever want. You want those, right? Anyways, you get base rookie cards and autos of the desirable rookies you were chasing in Update Series along the lines of Jarred Kelenic, Jonathan India, Andrew Vaughn, Akil Baddoo, and Alek Manoah.
At a price point more than double what we would normally pay for this product and not a doubling of the cards or the guaranteeing of a hit, this product, at least in Mega Box format, is an easy pass for me. Hangers and Cello packs are more interesting if they are more in line with previous years’ pricing. More than likely, I will pick up those if I run across them in a Target, but otherwise, I doubt I will own much or any of this product any time soon.