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 two scheduled hobby product releases - 2022 Topps Pristine Baseball and 2022 Topps Archives Signature Series Retired Player Edition. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2022 Topps Pristine Baseball
2022 Topps Pristine Baseball is returning after quite a long hiatus and is scheduled for release on Wednesday, July 13th.
There is currently only one announced configuration - a regular Hobby box. It comes with 3 autos with one of those autos being of the patch auto variety. They are currently running around $380 pre-sale. No mention of if this will or wont be dropped online, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t. No mention of retail, but at this price point, I’d say the odds are against it. Especially with this product being marketed as a “truly unique breaking experience” on the sell sheet. Finally, I have no idea what a pack within a pack within a pack is as the sell sheet mentions. Hopefully that means the condition of the cards are “pristine” - otherwise I don’t care. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for $349.99.
The design is interesting and hearkens back to some of the Pristine design elements from the early to mid-2000’s. It also reminds me a bit of some of the High-Tek designs from 2017 even though that was acetate and this looks to be paper. Just a lot of circular dots dominating the design. One other comment that could be shoe-horned in here is that you have the opportunity of getting encased autos or encased base parallels. It’s all very confusing on the breakdown of how often you will or won’t hit encased cards, but they tend to add a nice bonus and I typically like getting an encased card from a manufacturer.
The checklist was just announced and it has plenty of rookies, stars, and ex-MLB players. We get the required Wander Franco rookie base and autos along with the same for Oneil Cruz. We only get autos for Julio Rodriguez and Bobby Witt Jr. which is a bit less than we were hoping for. CJ Abrams is another one that falls in the auto-only bucket of desirable rookies.
With zero personal history with this product, I am interested to see what it looks like when it’s ripped and when it’s in hand. It seems to fit right in line with other Topps mid-tier releases and given it is the first year of its return to the scene, I expect it to be popular for at least a few weeks. Long term, I think it ends up in the mid-tier bucket that will find a following, but ultimately won’t outshine the rest of the products in that bucket. I’ll probably look to pick up a few PC singles cheap at some point, but more than anything, I am interested in seeing what this new product looks like.
2022 Topps Archives Signature Series Retired Edition
2022 Topps Archives Signature Series Retired Edition is scheduled to release on Wednesday, July 13th.
It comes in a single format - a regular Hobby box. The box contains a single encased buyback card with an on-card signature from a retired MLB player and that’s it - no base cards or anything else. They are currently selling around $80 pre-sale. Last year Topps sold these for $50 direct. ***Update - Topps is selling these boxes for $79.99
The design is purely based on the buy back card - it could be anything from 1952 Topps (it won’t), 1951 Bowman (it won’t) to 2021 Topps products (although at first glance I don’t see any recently retired players like Buster Posey). All cards are encased.
The checklist is all retired players, and this can lead to some great hits like Ken Griffey Jr. and Bo Jackson and some not so great like Rafael Furcal (no offense, but that’s going to hurt if you hit the pocket book if you hit a Furcal auto).
This is one of my favorite products every year. So much nostalgia and access to so many players autos that are Topps certified (which as we know has it’s problems, but it hasn’t been a problem with this product). I tend to either grab a box or get into a hit draft break of this product every year and it’s purely for collecting reasons as opposed to money reasons. I loved adding cards like this to my collection.