Each week over the past year our resident card expert Joe Lowry has given everyone on our Prospects Live Discord Baseball Card chat a heads up on what’s dropping in the Hobby. We’re now bringing those posts over to the main site to help keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time. This week we have two products being released: 2021 Bowman Platinum and 2021 Topps Ben Baller Chrome plus a new product announcement.
2021 Bowman Platinum
2021 Bowman Platinum is a retail-only lower tier release that technically started showing up in stores at the end of last week, but I’ll be covering it here since it will become more widely available this week.
There are all of the various retail formats - blaster boxes, cello packs, loose packs, and mega boxes. Mega boxes really are the story here as they are running around $80 and will guarantee you two autos per box. Previously this product was a Walmart exclusive and all I have seen so far seems to indicate this will continue in 2021.
The design for whatever reason underwhelms me every year. It is derivative of other Topps and Bowman designs and really doesn’t take any risks. At least with Topps Fire, you get a polarizing and often fun design. Bowman Platinum is just “blah” and I won’t belabor it any further.
The checklist is a 100 card base set of rookies and vets plus a 100 card base set of “top prospects”. That 100 card top prospect set is fully represented in the top prospects auto checklist as well. You can also find rookie and vet autos and relics, but those are typically harder to hit. With 100 prospects, you will have a couple of guys you would probably chase like Robert Hassell, Blaze Jordan, Garrett Mitchell, and Maximo Acosta. But the majority of the list leaves a fair amount to be desired. You will find a couple of the other bigger prospect names in the insert autos, which just like the rookies and vets, are much harder to hit. Guys like Jasson Dominguez, Wander Franco, Bobby Witt, Jr., Marco Luciano, Julio Rodriguez, Austin Martin, etc.
Bowman Platinum is a product I avoid every year unless I happen to be at a retail location and that is the only product on the shelf. The short term and long term value of these cards are very poor and the fact that the product is sticker autos only helps contribute to that. No 1st Bowman logo, a blah design, and poor value leaves this product to the “open for fun and/or desperation” category and that’s about it.
2021 Topps Ben Baller Chrome
New Icy Insert
2021 Topps Ben Baller Chrome is a mid-tier product that was announced late Monday (10/11) as an online exclusive for Montgomery Club members to purchase on Tuesday, October 12th.
There is only one format, a hobby box. Montgomery Club members, and likely the public as well once it goes one sale to everyone, are limited to three boxes at $240 per box (they were $250 last year). Pretty similar to last year, there are no guaranteed hits and each box should have 5 parallels. Last year had 6 parallels per box, but collation was absolutely terrible with some boxes having none and some having twice the advertised amount. Hopefully that is not the case this year.
The design is taking the base Flagship design and “Icing it” Ben Baller style. From what I’ve seen online, the base design is underwhelming, and I felt similarly last year. Either go full hog or don’t go at all. Ben Baller is diamonds in your face, and the base design just doesn’t seem to do that. On the other hand, I really liked the throwbacks last year, which were the 1985 design. This year will also have throwbacks with the 1986 design and I am looking forward to seeing some of these in the wild. There is also the die-cut insert returning, which was really nice as well. Last year was a diamond-focused design and this year will be an emerald-focused design. Finally there is an Icy insert new this year which looks pretty nice.
The checklist is similar to last year, just with a smidge more cards. You get the full base Topps Chrome checklist with all of the rookies and vets you would expect. The auto checklist consists of 14 players compared to 11 players last year. You’ll get some of the big name rookies and big name vets for autos, so there should be very little disappointment if you are lucky enough to hit any of them.
Last year this product was one of the few that used the raffle system, and I won the raffle, so I felt obligated to purchase a box. I ended up ripping the box and not being overly disappointed, but I doubt the cards I hit returned the value I spent on it. My guess is that it will be an equally tough ripped ROI, but there will likely be a decent sealed resell value. Probably somewhere in the $300 - $400 range if I had to guess. The one concern I would have is that the print run has increased significantly. Last year boxes were limited to one per account, where, at least for MC members, this is 3 per account now in 2021. This is a pretty strong indicator of an increased print run. Safe to say I won’t be fighting the bots if this does get released to the general public and I won’t be going out of my way for singles or breaks of this product as I don’t think the price point justifies it. On the other hand, if I like the throwbacks, I could see myself picking up a Joey Bart rookie 1986 card for my PC.
Lauren Taylor X Topps
Lauren Taylor is one of the more popular artists in the Topps Project 70 product and it was announced Tuesday morning on Lauren’s twitter that she will be doing a standalone product for Topps coming out in 2022. I have definitely enjoyed her take on Project 70, so looking forward to see where this goes. Stay tuned for more info on this in the future.