2012 Topps football retail mega review!

I've got a good post for you today, something I haven't done for a while:  a box/pack review!  Since I've cut down drastically on paying the wax pack idiot tax (free new blog name to the first person who wants to use it), I haven't had the fun of busting a new product in a while.  However, I was excited enough about 2012 Topps football and the imminent promise of trading with Colby (who'll have his own posts up about this shortly, I hear) to go for broke on retail packs.

After busting an entire case of the 2011 version as an experiment (with mixed results overall) last year, I decided to take a different tack.  Hobby boxes and their promise one lame relic or a not-quite-as-lame autograph were out of the question; jumbo boxes, despite their two auto-plus-one-relic appeal, are just too expensive to justify the purchase, especially when they don't seem to produce one base set anyway, at least not in my experience.

So today I experimented with 10 jumbo (or rack) packs of 36 cards each ($5.29/per) and one 72-card hanger box ($10.49).  I'd generally heard those were the way to go because the blasters and their guaranteed Captain manupatches (and dicey player selection, other than Charles Woodson and Jake Long!) don't justify spending $20 for 81 cards.  Here's a look at how I did:

Base:

Here's the front and back of Calvin Johnson's base card.  It's a fairly pleasing design this year overall.  I don't have much more to say about it because the rest is pretty standard:  stamps for achievements, RCs scattered throughout the set (bring back piling them all up at the end of the set, Topps!) and useless team cards, but some fun shots.  Note that I didn't pull any SPs (excellent list on SportsCardRadio, plus a full checklist, all while Beckett employees waste time pleasuring themselves to their own videos of box breaks), but then again, that's why they're called "SPs."

Set completion:  268/440
Doubles:  83
Triples:  23
Quads:  1
Total extras:  107/375

No sense in bitching about not-excellent collation when you buy 10 random racks and a hanger, I guess.  Hopefully I can trade some of these to Colby.

Inserts:
I ended up mostly with the ones that came one per pack but did get a few that were slightly tougher, and then one total surprise.  I'll list the odds for the ones that weren't in every pack.  Here they are in the order I liked them, least to most:

Game Time Giveaway:  5 (one came in the hanger, four in the racks, not sure on odds)
It's not that I hate these, but Topps' increasingly dubious and useless "giveaways" don't inspire much confidence in me these days.  I may try to actually sell them this year, something I regret not doing last year.

 

Prolific Playmakers:  11
Let's see, the design is extremely boring and seems like it was intended for some other mailed-in Topps base set.  That and the player selection is often questionable, especially since there's autographed versions of these.  Seriously, Jabar Gaffney?  F-- for this one, Topps.

 
Paramount Pairs:  11
These aren't all that bad, it's just that it's such a stale concept at this point.  We're starting to get into Topps baseball reprints territory with how derivative and predictable these are.  Fine design, but definitely not a set I'm going to collect.

QB Immortals:  4 (1:2 jumbos)
Not an especially thrilling design, but pretty good, and obviously these are quality players we'll be seeing.  I may actually try to work on this if I can trade for the ones I need--no sense in spending anything on them otherwise.

Gold parallels (#d /2012):  4 (1:3)
Nice and familiar, but in a good way, not an "If you make just ONE more ToppsTown-type insert, you're going to be getting a redemption card for your favorite pet" way.  The complaint about the atrociously lame serial number "stamp" stands, however.

Pink parallel (#d to 399):  2 (1:17)

It's a relatively small gesture, but a quality one to try to raise breast cancer awareness with this interesting insert.  I'm not so insecure that I wouldn't say these are kind of cool, even if I probably won't be going after the versions of my favorite players with too much effort.

QB Rookie Reprints:  9 (1:2)

This is my blog so if I want to rag on Topps for overdoing baseball reprints but utilize the concept (which, admittedly, has been done) with football, I can.  Kind of cool how they limited it to QBs this time, and if they did a different position the next couple of years, I think I'd be down.  This is the set I'm most likely to try to complete, and fortunately it's not even very large.

1965 Topps Tall Boys:  11

Last year it was the minis, and this year it's this pretty sweet throwback.  The set's much too large for me to consider completing and I'll probably send this to an appreciative Colby instead, but I do very much like the inclusion of something this fun.

Those are all the more standard inserts you'll pull, but I did end up with this guy, which caught me completely by surprise:

"What's so great about that?" you're probably asking.  Well, when I noticed it standing out in the pack, I figured I'd just pulled another of Topps' various parallel versions and nothing special.  That is, until I flipped it over to check the serial numbering so I could figure out what it was:

Whoa!  There's a 1/1 that came out of the blue!  Definitely not something you see every day when it comes to retail, that's for sure.  I've only pulled two other 1/1s, one being from 2008 Razor Letterman and another in my 2011 Topps football last year, but both of those were from cases.  Not, bad, not bad at all, Topps.

I'm not exactly sure what to do with it because I don't know what pricing would work out to be on a guy like this, but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna try to sell it if I think I can get enough for it; otherwise I can make it available to someone who appreciates the Lions more than me, which shouldn't be hard to find.

Summary:

These were fun to bust; I enjoyed the jumbos far more than the hanger, which basically involved opening the box and removing a shrink-wrapped brick of cards to flip through.  Jumbo packs are just more fun, though either way you've got a decent chance of pulling something worthwhile.  A few of the inserts were pretty boring but one of the guaranteed pulls is the sure-to-be-popular Tall Boys.  Random (e.g. terrible) retail collation is still your enemy, but if you can get past not likely pulling a crappy hit, these offerings are a good way to go.  Whether you're going for an impulse buy or working on the set, I'd recommend some jumbos, especially if you can get them on sale.

I'm hoping to pick up a few more racks to get myself closer to the set, then I'll see where Colby is at, and hopefully we can help each other with our wantlists without requiring further spending.  If any of you happen to be busting these too, though, please let me know, as I'll eventually be making a lot of this available.

I hope you enjoyed this review, and I promise I'll have more good content coming soon, especially in the form of purchases from eBay, SportLots, and eventually, COMC!

Look what the Kemp dragged in

So today as I was flipping through my various boxes in trying to pick out some stuff for a potential trade with another blogger, I was perusing my box of almost-complete and sort-of-started sets.  The almost-complete ones are all on my set wantlist while I left the latter there to have them together in case I decided to pursue them later.  As I was sorting through a small stack of Bowmans, I noticed I had put a couple in penny sleeves, as I occasionally do when I know a rookie is worth enough to try to keep it in good shape.  Who was this mystery RC, a card I had totally forgotten I had?

None other than Greg Z.'s man-crush, Matt Kemp!  This is, of course, his 2005 Bowman RC.  Now that I know I have it, I'm reserving it for the prestige of my baseball RC PC.

My pre-trade sorting wasn't just lucrative because of the Kemp, though--I even found three 2009 Bowman singles I need towards that set, which is pretty cool since I already needed just a small handful.  If I've taken anything out of this, it's that putting in the effort to find some cards to trade is good karma.  As opposed to being symbolic of the worst parts of the hobby and screwing over Greg, which is definitely bad karma;  Chris Olds, may every football box you bust from now on contain nothing but Bilal Powell and Akili Smith!

Beckett, as in wreck-it

I had hoped to regale you all with some trade post goodness today, but instead I feel obligated to tackle a different topic:  Beckett.  I have two primary motivations for doing so, one being that I had already intended to add my two cents to what a couple other bloggers already discussed in their excellent posts, and the other being how one of the biggest detriments to the hobby has treated one of our own.

In case you didn't see all of this, Play at the Plate featured a great response to a $30 a Week Habit post that was written in response to another PATP article.

Still with me?

To sum up, PATP looked at what collecting was like when MLB wasn't killing the hobby with the Toppsopoly and we were on the opposite extreme--too many choices--and wonders if we're better off.  $30aWH then puts his own spin on things with an alternate universe in which "the magazine" doesn't exist.  PATP plays off this and decides that Beckett is obsolete, not to mention inaccurate.  (While I'm discussing what these two excellent bloggers did, I'd like to point out just how much I appreciate what they and all you other guys do:  provide a great community that can foster discussion like this in a coherent manner that literally doesn't exist anywhere else, ESPECIALLY on beckett.com.)

Pissed Off Card Collector FTW

Though I haven't exactly timely with my posts, I thought I'd briefly discuss my experiences as a collector who grew up during Beckett's heyday.

When I was very young my parents apparently bought some cards for me and my brother, which I know because we played with them until we got a bit older and understood the concept of collecting.  I'm pretty sure they were factory sets of '89 Donruss and Topps because I had a bunch of those, though not necessarily the better cards in either set.  We then picked up the occasional packs, and eventually--though I can't remember how--came into knowledge of the yearly Beckett price guide books, which were available at our library.  That segued into our discovery of Beckett, which introduced to us the idea of "value" as it pertained to sports cards.  I definitely enjoyed collecting the magazine and still have all my issues from when I subscribed, plus a bunch of older ones I picked up through various means.  And for quite a while, I did what many others did and swore by the "book" prices when it came to buying, selling and trading online and at shows.

That made for good and bad moments.  There were plenty of times we'd pull something rare from a wax box or dig something out of a closet, look it up and discover it was "worth" way more than we thought.  Then again, reality would come crashing down on us when we found out a $20 card didn't ever sell for $20.  But more importantly it could impact trading (again, most of which we did online, especially initially through Beckett's Buy/Sell area) when you or your partner didn't feel you were getting "equal value" according to the price guide.  It didn't matter if you were giving up better overall cards or if you were just a few bucks apart--usually at that point the deal died.

In the last couple years I definitely got away from trading (and selling, really) while continuing to acquire stuff, mainly through boxes, many of which proved disappointing, as they can at times.  The few times I did, though, along with the occasions where I'd open a box or acquire something, I would still swear by the card Bible.  What saved me from that limited collecting life was following collecting blogs.  As I started to notice people throwing around trade packages without a care for value, I gained a new-found energy for collecting myself because I thought "THIS is exactly what trading should be."  Really, it's about as pure as it gets aside from most of it taking place online these days, but then again, it opens up so many more trade possibilities, especially when you can easily work with a Dodgers fan all the way across the country.

What I'm getting at is that during my collecting years when I held fast to the magazine, I enjoyed a relatively OK collecting experience, but since then, I've finally grown up and realized just how obsolete it really is, both in terms of the price guide and its various features.  These days you'll hear sellers on forums swear by eBay prices (which is at least slightly more accurate, if not completely) which are a million times more "real-time" than Beckett's false claims.  That, and, as Brian pointed out, you're no longer stuck with Beckett as the only game in town for box breaks; instead of reading about their suspiciously good fortune with one outstanding box, you can get a ridiculous sample size including scans and video.  And don't get me started about pimping the next big thing.  It's a shame that magazines like Beckett can't sometimes discuss the more negative aspects of the hobby--constructively, with a dialogue about how things can improve--and instead choose to be blissfully unaware of monopolies, fakes, and other real problems.

All of that led me to ditch Beckett as a price guide once and for all a couple years ago.  I continue to use the site as a checklist resource but otherwise studiously ignore it, since that's the best thing to do in this case.  That's worked out just fine for me, especially since I'd quickly grown sick of the shenanigans of major players like Chris Olds, et al.  However, recently, something happened to one of my favorite bloggers that I couldn't let stand.

Here are some facts about Greg Z. of Plaschke Thy Sweater is Argyle:

• Greg is an excellent, very well-respected blogger
• Greg loves his Dodgers and collects the hell out of them (key word here:  "collects")
• Greg made it into a Beckett-run contest as one of three finalists, one of which would win a Sandy Koufax autograph
• Many people, especially his fellow bloggers and collectors would like to see him win this contest because he'd, you know, KEEP the thing and enjoy it as a Dodgers collector

But THEN,

one of the three finalists, a total asshat who sang a Justin Beiber song and should have been automatically disqualified except he was such an asshat even Chris Olds was like, "Whoa, this guy is REALLY an asshat.  I'm not mad, that's amazing!" decided to literally buy votes.  In a respectful manner, Greg pointed this out.  Olds' response, which took a while because he had to manually remove him from Topps' nuts and sit him in front of the only keyboard in the world that's large enough for his fat fingers, was this:

That's right:  when Greg came forward with evidence that one of his competitors was cheating and--once again--literally BUYING VOTES, then others piled on by reasonably pointing out how ridiculously unfair that was, Chris referred to these people as "complainers" making "mud-slinging allegations" and made them all sound ungrateful.  Luckily for everyone, next time he'll save us "the hassles" (didn't know it was possible to have more than one) and pick someone himself, which is simply what he should have done in the first place, except Mr. Olds is apparently unaware that they have the Internet on computers now, and said computers can be used to break any poll or contest.  When I tried to point that out, my comment was, to my utter shock, not approved by their moderator.

Because of all of that, Beckett is officially dead to me.  If anyone ever comes to me in a deal and quotes the "Beckett" price I'll just give them this look,

and go on my merry way.  As for the people behind "the magazine" that embody everything that's wrong with the hobby,

You stay classy, Beckett, and go fuck yourselves. 

Good luck all the same to a great blogger everyone knows and loves.  VOTE FOR GREG Z!

Update:  this one's for Eric L!: