This Week in Baseball Cards - 12/6 - 12/12

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 Topps Chrome Black and 2021 Topps Heritage High Number. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week.

2021 Topps Chrome Black

2021 Topps Chrome Black is back for its sophomore season after debuting last year as a very popular, albeit expensive one hit product. It is scheduled to release on Wednesday, December 8th.

There is only one format - a hobby box, and the configuration remains the same from its inaugural release. Each box comes with a single base pack plus one encased autograph. The base pack has two base cards plus a numbered refractor. The encased auto is in a sealed one touch and can be base or numbered. These boxes are currently selling for around $145 - $150 and Topps sold these directly from their website last year at $150 a box. Given the pre-sale prices from the online distributors, I am going to guess Topps will hold steady at $150 this year

The design is very similar to last year with a sort of black matte finish, although the geometric triangles that were so prominent in last year’s design, especially for any of the refractor/color cards has been toned down. In my opinion, that’s a good change. Black cards are notorious for condition issues, but I didn’t encounter many of those last year, so hopefully they are able to repeat that quality.

The checklist has 100 base cards of current MLB players - all the rookies and vets you would expect to see including some of the rookies that carwere held back for Update. Strangely they chose not to include Jonathan India in this product though. The autos come in two formats - a base auto and a Super Futures auto and players can be in both sets, although the Super Futures autos are a smaller list. There were a total of 105 cards with autos (including players with cards in both) in 2020 and that has increased to 143 cards with autos in 2021. The players included are current rookies, MLB vets, and retired MLB players. A majority of this list is what we have been seeing throughout the year, so I wont go in depth here, but you will likely find the guys you have been chasing (outside of the aforementioned India). Since these autos are all on card (nice!), you won’t be getting any of the recently passed players that we have seen make their way into other sets throughout the year via stickers like Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Al Kaline.

I was on the fence about this product when it came out last year and that was mainly driven by the price point. $150 for a single auto, even if it was on card and encased, felt like a bit much. Add in that I wasn’t smitten with the design, and I sat on the sidelines outside of picking up two PC players - a base auto of Will Clark and Mike Yastrzemski respectively. I think I paid under $60 combined for both cards. As much as I think they have nicely tweaked the design, the price hasn’t changed much if at all and the print run and checklist has only gotten longer. To support the longer auto checklist, they have added Purple (/150) and Green Atomic (/99) parallels to the base card set. This essentially leads me to approaching this the same way - buying a PC card or two and moving on. But I totally understand why collectors would go hard on this product because it does provide something a bit higher end and somewhat unique to the majority of Topps releases.

2021 Topps Heritage High Number

2021 Topps Heritage High Number is scheduled to release on Wednesday, December 8th* and is a low-end product focused on a previous Topps design - in this case, 1972 Topps. *This is the hobby date; retail has already hit the shelves over the past week or two.

There is one hobby format and then various retail formats of Heritage High Number (HHN). Hobby boxes guarantee one auto OR one relic card and can be found for around $85 - $90. Last year Topps sold Hobby boxes directly for $85 and I expect it will fall around there or maybe a tad higher again this year. There should be all the various formats of retail, although we may not see Mega boxes. Last year I believe Megas were only for the Heritage release and not High Number. This year for the regular Heritage release, the Megas had 3 exclusive red border parallels.

The design is focused on 1972 Topps. Sort of a throwback movie marquee style design, it’s nice that it is fully white borders. This helps prevent a lot of the edge and corner condition issues that we saw in last year’s 1971 black bordered design, especially for a mass produced product. It’s one of my least favorite throwback designs, but there are a lot of collectors who love it. The other item to note is that like all Heritage releases, the variations/purposeful errors are plentiful and outside of the low-numbered Red Ink autos (sexy!), are the real chase in the product. They often go for a lot of money for the most desirable rookies.

The checklist is typically a catch-all for the players in Update and some of the Series 2 players, especially the ones that didn’t make it into the primary Heritage release. You get to see Jonathan India, Jarred Kelenic, Andrew Vaughn, Akil Baddoo, etc. from the Update rookies. Being a Heritage product, you also get plenty of retired MLB players as well along the lines of Steve Carlton, Dusty Baker, Brooks Robinson, etc. One other oddity is that currently Juan Soto has two different Real One autos listed - not really sure what that’s about.

I pretty much avoided Heritage High Number last year given the condition issues and lack of chase players outside of Luis Robert. Just like 2020 Update Series had a rough checklist, so did 2020 Heritage High Number. This year, I am more interested in the checklist, but the design isn’t a favorite of mine. Add in the fact that hobby boxes don’t guarantee you an auto, and I am likely out. I don’t mind that format as much with flagship since you get the bonus chrome mojo pack, but with HHN it’s more than likely some oversized box topper (yuck). Occasionally you will get foil-stamped 1972 buybacks, which I like, but it’s not worth buying a hobby box for. As with Topps Chrome Black, I will at most be in the aftermarket singles game and that’s it.