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 releases - 2022 Topps Museum Collection and 2022 Onyx Premium Baseball. In addition, we got our first look at the Topps 2023 Flagship design. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Flagship Design
Topps has released their 2023 Flagship design. This design is what you will see in Topps Series 1/Series 2/Update Series, Topps Chrome/Chrome Update, various editions of those products, and other products that incorporate the Flagship design like Opening Day and Clearly Authentic.
The primary design elements are a full white border with a busy bottom section of the card. That contains the team name, player name, player position, team logo, and a player head-shot. The team name is partially hidden behind the head-shot, which I find as a necessary evil to this design. The design we get is of Adley Rutschman, so we also get to see the RC logo. Unfortunately it is placed in a spot that seems like a poor design choice. It gets lost amongst the rest of the design elements at the bottom of the card. We’ll see how it looks when we get them in hand. Finally, the team logo is pretty big and bold. It feels like this is a love/hate element. I’m still not sure how I feel about that part of it and probably need to see how it plays across all teams.
Overall I like the design, mostly because we do get the full white border and the homage to 1983 Topps. I think it could be better if they addressed the crowding at the bottom of the card, but I am not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. As always, it will likely be polarizing amongst collectors and I’ve already seen both positive and negative impressions of the design.
2022 Topps Museum Collection
2022 Topps Museum Collection is a mid-tier release scheduled for release on Wednesday, September 7th.
There is only one configuration - a regular Hobby box. The box comes with four mini-boxes, each with their own hit. Two will contain autos and two will contain relics typically. In years past, the mini boxes with the relics and the mini boxes with the autos were consistently placed from left to right. This means buyer beware on buying mini-boxes - typically these will be the non-auto boxes that unscrupulous people will resell without disclosing that those mini-boxes contain just the relic card (plus additional non-hit cards). Currently these boxes are selling for around $350 pre-sale. Last year Topps sold them for $299.99 direct from their website. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for $399.99 and a case of Hobby boxes, something we rarely see, for $4,799.99. That’s right, zero discount on a case but should get a case hit.
The design is typical Museum Collection - a higher end feel as if this is a painting to hang in a museum. A lot of marbley-white and wood frame browns. More importantly, Museum Collection has some really nice booklets, patches, game-used base relics, and bat nameplates. Be aware that typically the relic auto cards are sticker autos although some of the shorter numbered auto relic versions can be on card. The straight autos will usually be on card, so at least we get that.
The checklist is typical of these mid-tier releases with a heavy dose of current and ex-MLB players with less of a focus on the rookies. In the base rookie set, we get the higher tier rookies featuring Wander Franco, Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodriguez, CJ Abrams, Spencer Torkelson, Alek Thomas, and one I don’t think we’ve seen yet in a hobby product with Royce Lewis. The hits, relics and autos, are heavily weighted towards non-rookie current and ex-players.
I like Museum Collection, and when I got back into the hobby, it was something I looked forward to yearly. However, as the price point has pretty much doubled, my interest has waned. Given the volume of the non rookies in the product, hunting rookies in Museum Collection is not often a fruitful exercise. This makes it harder on the ROI as the speculators really don’t play in this space. I’ll pick up some PC cards in the secondary market if the price is right, but the box prices and break prices are going to be too high for my taste.
2022 Onyx Premium Baseball
2022 Onyx Premium Baseball is back for its second year and is scheduled to release on Friday, September 9th.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Currently they can be found for around $55 pre-sale, which is relatively in line with the price point we saw last year. Each box comes with two autographed cards on thicker 55 point stock. There are no base cards in the product.
The design is very bold with almost like a vertical, straight tapering banner coming down behind the player. Strong colors are the other main design call-out and are likely going to hit with some collectors and turn others away. As with all Onyx releases, the autographs are on card. In addition, there will be inscriptions included on some cards including a Benny Montgomery auto spelling out his name in Braille (unfortunately it won’t be true Braille with the raised bumps, but the thought does count).
The checklist at the moment has 33 names, mostly young prospects, with a sprinkling of current and ex-players. I won’t give every name, but it sure feels like I could. Adley, Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodriguez, Corbin Carroll, Riley Greene, Jordan Walker, Jordan Lawlar, Kumar Rocker, Dylan Crews, etc. It’s going to be hard to get back to back “bad” boxes unless the final checklist is significantly larger.
As usual with Onyx baseball products, I love the price point, hard-signed autos, and strong checklist. You have to keep in mind that these are unlicensed which will keep the ROI capped, but given the price point, it’s not a huge drag. I likely will pick up a box for myself and would recommend it for anyone looking for a decently priced rip.
The Arena Club
News dropped yesterday that we have a new grading/marketplace/vaulting player in the space backed by some known names in the venture capital space (including an ex-CEO of Topps, Ryan O’Hara) but most importantly one of the biggest names in baseball, Derek Jeter.
The grading proposition promises machine learning and AI involvement in the grading process, but give zero details at the moment on exactly how, what, when, etc. on it. I don’t think it is on the level of HGA obfuscation, but I do feel like we should get more disclosure on this topic from Arena Club. They do list an AI professor and Adjunct Fellow from Stanford on their board who likely led this effort.
The slabs are from Ultra-Pro and the label/flip is color-coded to the grade (similar to BGS). Black labels will be anything with an overall grade of 9.5 and lower. Silver labels will be overall 10’s with at least one sub-grade below 10. Gold labels are the top and will be a pristine 10 with all sub-grades at a 10. Sub-grades are displayed on the back of the card allowing along with a QR code that gets you access to the full grading report online. At the moment it appears they are only grading 35 point cards.
The grading report online is very impressive and in my opinion provides one of the strongest reasons at the moment to give Arena Club some business. It’s a fully interactive experience that allows you to zoom in and out on the card. All flaws noted during the grading process should be marked so that you can view in full detail why the card got the grade it did (although I did run across a card where flaws on the back were not highlighted). Classifications of minor or major issues.
Currently grading and then vaulting your card starts at $25 per card. Insurance and shipping costs are additional fees (I was being quoted $10 insurance and $6 for shipping when I was playing around with a submission). If you want to grade and have it shipped back to you rather than vaulting, it increases the cost by $10 per card. It looks like Arena Club is intimating that these are introductory prices as they do show a $5 increase on each option setup in smaller and lighter font next to these prices. In addition, the vaulting costs are free at the moment, but it shows $5 in the small/lighter font that I am guessing implies future costs to vault your cards.
The vaulting feature doesn’t appear much different than any other vaulting scenario in play at places like PWCC and eBay, among others, so I won’t spend much time on it. It is worth noting that they will accept a subset of other grading companies’ cards in their vault (PSA, BGS, SGC, CSG).
The marketplace again offers what you would expect and nothing really innovative, but it does promise the ability to trade cards with other vaulters, which I do find somewhat of a nice value add. That does depend on having enough volume of cards in the marketplace/vault to make this a healthy and active ecosystem, so we shall see.
Overall Jeter’s name brings a lot of marketing fanfare potential and lends credibility. The grading report is very good and gives me the most hope. A smaller newcomer in the space has fully automated grading (TAG) and at first I was hoping that Arena Club was offering a similar technical solution, but at the moment we are a bit in the dark as to how much human vs. machine is at play with Arena Club’s grading process. Eliminating the human element for the most part eliminates subjectivity, and that needs to be the north star for every grading company. I am mostly positive about this new player. I still have questions and I will be watching their progress and how they answer those questions closely. You can check them out at the Arena Club website.