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 is one scheduled release - 2023 Topps Inception.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week. ***Updated for 2023 Topps Chrome Update Sapphire Edition.
2023 Topps Inception
The artistic inspired product, 2023 Topps Inception is scheduled to release on Wednesday, December 6th.
There is a single configuration - a regular Hobby box. It comes with a single pack of 7 cards - 4 base cards, 2 parallel cards, and 1 autograph. Topps pre-sold Hobby boxes a month ago for $139.99 with a customer limit of 4 boxes. Last year, Topps sold these boxes for $149.99 on release day. There are no other formats. ***Update - As expected, Topps is selling boxes for $149.99 with a customer limit of 4 on release day. In addition, they are selling Cases (16 boxes per case) for $2,329.99 with a customer limit of 2.
The design is what we expect from Inception - impressionist brush strokes and swirls with tons of color. The base, as usual, is more of white and gray with that swirl of color going around the player, but since you get two parallels per box, it’s nice to see that design in every rip with at least one if not two full color cards. Autos will be a mixture of on card and stickers, with the relic autos being the highest likelihood of sticker autos, although that won’t always be the case. Cards are all on thick stock which is really nice, but can be challenging to always get them in mint condition. Even though Inception often provides really cool patches, a good amount of them are typically player worn rather than game worn. New this year is an auto-relic set call First Milestones. The relic is part of the base from the game in which they got their first hit with an MLB authentication hologram sticker that you can verify online. From what I’ve seen, these cards are also on card autos. It’s a cool edition to the product, although there has been a bit of controversy that we’ll get to with the checklist.
As usual, there are plenty of rookies, vets, and ex-MLB players in this checklist. It’s a healthy mixture of rookies across the year where we get some of the Update rookies in addition to the beginning of the year rookies. This is a change from the past as Inception has typically been a spring release. However, with the First Milestone cards being a new addition, and the logistics behind it, they had to wait until they could get the current year rookies have their first hit, then get the base sent to production for the cards, and then have the players hard-sign them. This pushed the release to a Winter release, and gave them time to get guys like Patrick Bailey and Eury Pérez and other Update rookies into the product. But there are still lingering signs of the Spring release situation - for example, Gabriel Moreno autographed cards are Blue Jays cards, while his base rookie card is a Diamondbacks card. Moreno was traded to Arizona at this time last year. Finally I mention the controversy - once the checklist started making the rounds, people were significantly disappointed in the First Milestones checklist. The main chase rookies on it were Jordan Walker and Masataka Yoshida. Missing were a ton of rookies that people were hoping for but hadn’t completely thought through - Corbin Carroll, Michael Harris II, Triston Casas, Francisco Álvarez, Brett Baty, Josh Jung, Adley Rutschman, and Gunnar Henderson being the big ones. The issue is that they were 2022 MLB debut guys even though they were 2023 Baseball Card Rookies. Getting the bases to include as relics may have been logistically not possible, and Topps wasn’t likely thinking this far ahead if they did have the ability to get them back in 2022. None of the Update rookies made sense either because their first milestones were too late to get them into production (not that there were big hitter chases there anyways - it was a pitcher heavy chase product). So ultimately of the 2023 debut guys that made it in before the Baseball Card Rookie cut-off starting in June, the biggest name absent is Anthony Volpe. After that, there really isn’t a big chase guy. So we get Jordan Walker and Masataka Yoshida, but not Volpe, which is disappointing, but not as egregious as you might think at first blush.
I used to be really into Topps Inception, but the past few years have priced me out of it. Years ago these boxes were easily under $100, but once they crossed that threshold, it lost a lot of the value. While these cards sell well shortly after the release, in the long term they don’t often hold enough value to justify current price points. Putting aside the price issue I have with it, I really do enjoy these cards and my only other complaints are the sticker autos and the player worn material. I don’t mind that at cheaper price points, but the more expensive the product is, the more I want it to be the preferred on card autos and game worn relics. As I too often say these days, if I’m getting any of this, it will be singles in the after market.
2023 Topps Chrome Update Sapphire Edition
On Tuesday, December 5th, Topps sent out an email to the general public that 2023 Topps Chrome Update Sapphire Edition would be “Coming Soon”. On Wednesday, December 6th, Topps began selling it on their website.
There is one format - a regular Hobby box. This year the guarantees per box have again changed. The first two years of the product (2020-2021) came with one auto (sticker) and one parallel. In 2022, it changed to 2 parallels and no guaranteed auto (on card, low numbered). This year, we are back to one guaranteed auto (sticker) and we are up to 3 parallels per box. Each box comes with a total of 32 cards. Topps is selling boxes on its website for $224.99 with a customer limit of 4. They are also selling Cases (10 boxes per case) for $2,179.99 with a customer limit of 2. Last year these boxes were $130, and in the years with guaranteed autos (2020-2021), these boxes were around $150.
The design is the standard Flagship Chrome design given the Sapphire treatment, so not a ton to dive into there. Just like in 2023 Bowman Chrome Sapphire Edition, we are getting an insert called Sapphire Selections. A borderless card with the full background looking vaguely gem-like, I liked these cards in Bowman Chrome Sapphire and expect to like them just as much here since they seem to be an identical design. For whatever reason, Topps has decided to swap the purple parallels out of 10 for black parallels out of 10. We are also losing the base green parallels altogether, which the Hobby isn’t likely sad about. However, the print run must go up! So the insert addition as well as an autographed edition of the insert plus doubling the rookie autograph subjects and giving them a lot more autographed cards (base are out of 199 while last year there wasn’t an auto numbered higher than 25) will help Topps extend that print run.
The checklist for the base is essentially identical to 2023 Topps Update Series. Not 2023 Topps Chrome Update checklist, so try not to be confused by that. They use the regular Flagship checklists for Topps Chrome Sapphire and Topps Chrome Update Sapphire because the paper Flagship checklists are larger than the Flagship Chrome checklists which then supports larger print runs and more money for Topps/Fanatics - there really is no other reason to do it the way they currently are doing it. For the rookie autos, we are getting all the big chase guys we want to see - Volpe, Corbin Carroll, Gunnar, Adley, Kodai Senga, Michael Harris II, Yoshida, and Casas.
The move to bring back the guaranteed auto is nice to see. The almost $100 price point increase to do so - not so nice. I think they did everything right but the price point here. At under $150, this is a decent buy in the current state of the Hobby. I would hate to buy a box and end up with 3 vet parallels and an auto of Brayan Rocchio or Taj Bradley. I’ll eventually look to pick up some singles of Patrick Bailey and Casey Schmitt, but I’d be spending my box and break money elsewhere.