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 there are no scheduled releases, but we did get unexpected pre-sales from Topps for 2023 Topps Chrome and 2023 Topps T206 Low Series.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Chrome Pre-Sale
Announced on Tuesday, 6/27 and Pre-Sale go live on Wednesday, 6/28. Actual release date is still TBD.
The 2023 Topps Chrome configurations for pre-sale were Blaster boxes, regular Hobby boxes, and Jumbo Hobby boxes. Blaster boxes are being sold for $34.99, the exact same price Topps sold them for in 2022. Hobby boxes are being sold for $124.99 where they were $299.99 last year (more on that in a second). Jumbo Hobby boxes are being sold for $299.99 and were not sold by Topps last year. The Hobby and Jumbo Hobby box configuration have changed configurations - Hobby boxes were previously two autos per box and are now one auto per box. Jumbos were previously five autos per box and are now three autos per box.
The checklist is not yet released, so it’s difficult to read the tea leaves on value.
However, the MVP buyback program is returning to provide some extra value. With 2022 Topps Chrome products, you could get credit from participating cards shops/online outlets for turning in cards of the 2022 NL and AL MVPs - Paul Goldschmidt and Aaron Judge. The value depended on the card - base, refractor, colored refractor. Some of those cards of Goldy and Judge that were bought back are being stamped, numbered, and repacked into this year’s product. Some will include autos as well, numbered to 22 (for the year 2022 that they won the MVP award). In 2023, we won’t know who wins the 2023 MVP awards until the season is completed, but once it has been, then Topps should announce the timing and any other pertinent details. The leaders in the clubhouse right now are Shohei Ohtani in the AL and Ronald Acuña Jr. in the NL. As far as products go, they called out Topps Chrome and Chrome Logofractor that will be part of the program, but did not mention Sonic, which was in the program for 2022 products. This could mean that Sonic is one and done. Find the details here.
***Update - Topps held their bi-weekly LCS conference call (a new part of their terms and conditions for the local card shops is to attend this) and further details came out about 2023 Topps Chrome. Some of the highlights:
July 26th release date
No relief pitcher autos (we shall see)
Part of the above point - autos are supposed to be more “impactful”, more position players. They used this as justification for dropping the amount of autos per box for Hobby and Jumbo Hobby configurations.
Breaker box configuration - no specific details, but was described as legend and rookie heavy with dual rookie autos
2023 Topps T206 Low Series
Collectors were clamoring for the return of Topps T206 and Topps obliged by announcing that T206 Low Series will be going on pre-sale on Thursday, 6/29 (If you didn’t catch the sarcasm, it’s there).
In years past, Topps has sold this in Waves and sold them for $14.99 per box (pack). No autos have been guaranteed in the past, and I don’t anticipate that changing. At the very least, there seems to be some form of change with the move to a “Low Series” versus a Wave format. That implies that perhaps we are getting two releases rather than the 5 or more with the Wave approach.
No other details are known and this will be updated as soon as more comes out.
***Update - As promised, this went on sale on the Topps website on Thursday, 6/29 and sold out within a few hours. The price was $54.99 per box with a limit of 10 per purchase (not per customer). There are a ton of variations that I won’t get into. The main chase, autos, are now 1 in 3 boxes and come with 40 cards per box instead of 10 last year. I couldn’t find the odds on autos, but they were pretty long and were just 3 to 4 signers per wave, with the exception of Wave 1, which did not include autographs. Last year’s autos were not hobby-desirable players, which further lessened the interest in the product. They’ve done better this year, although of the 24 signers, probably 4 at this point are given you any hope of an ROI - Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Gunnar Henderson, Masataka Yoshida, and Brett Baty.