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 two scheduled release - 2024 Topps Chrome Sapphire Edition and 2024 Topps Five Star.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Topps Chrome Sapphire Edition
The popular Chrome Sapphire Edition of the Topps Flagship product has been covered in the last two weeks of This Week in Baseball Cards for pre-order purposes and is finally getting its official release date this Wednesday, September 25th.
There is one format - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with one auto and should have three parallels. The cost was $349.99 at pre-order for both 582 Montgomery Club members as well as the general public. I suspect that there will not be any more sales of the product come release day, but I guess you never know. This price point is over $100 increase from last year with no real change to the product other than the checklist, so take that for what its worth.
The design is the Flagship design given the Chrome Sapphire treatment. The only insert is the popular Sapphire Selections insert, which is borderless and gives you the full on Sapphire background. All autos should be on card.
The checklist is 700 base cards - essentially the combined base checklist of Topps Series 1 and Topps Series 2. The main rookie chases are Elly De La Cruz, Jasson Dominguez, Junior Caminero, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Shota Imanaga. The big four short print guys from Series 2 (Holliday, Chourio, Merrill, and Langford) only have autos in this product - no base cards according to the checklist.
While I’m a fan of this product, the price point and the huge checklist are huge concerns. Ripping personal boxes is regularly going to end in disappointment when you’re paying $350 - $500 a box and getting just 32 cards. Breaks may make some sense, but this is primarily a singles product.
2024 Topps Five Star
The mid-tier, hit-only product is scheduled to release on Friday, September 27th.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with two autographed cards and nothing else. There are no base cards. On rare circumstances, big hits, like booklets, may lead to just one card, or sometimes you’ll get three auto cards in a box. Typically those three auto card boxes are because you’re getting some bottom of the barrel of the checklist autos in that box. Topps did pre-orders for this product back on September 9th for $239.99 and it sold out fast.
The design is typical Five Star - heavy on the golds, blacks, and greys, with a lot of angular and star design highlights. Usually these cards are on thicker paper stock than usually found on lower-tier products. There is a Field Access autograph set that we get a marketing image of for Evan Carter that looks fantastic, showing him in the foreground with the stadium at night lit up behind him. Hopefully the rest of the cards in this set are of similar high-end photography as this Evan Carter. Autos should all be on card.
The checklist includes all of the rookie chases including Paul Skenes autos (which is why this probably sold out so fast earlier this month). Also included are Elly De La Cruz, Jasson Dominguez, Junior Caminero, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, Jackson Merrill, and Wyatt Langford, among many others.
Five Star is a product I tend to avoid - the checklist is so large that even if boxes were around $150, I’d find it hard to spend that money. Just two autos and no base cards mean you need to hit hard to get your money back. On the other hand, the rookie checklist is all you could hope for, and Skenes autos are in the short term going to really drive the market. In the long run, Five Star cards just don’t hold enough value to justify the box price points. If you do want to get some of these cards, it should really only be the singles market. Even breaks are rough - with just 8 boxes per case, you’re essentially getting 16 cards per case break. Even if you had a perfect distribution of teams, where there was no doubling up of cards for a single team, that’s 14 teams without a hit. 14 spots in a single team PYT break are going to skunk at a minimum, which is a tough pill to swallow, especially if you bought a really expensive team. For me, this product is one I let pass me by every year.