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 release with 2023 Topps Diamond Icons.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Diamond Icons
The high-end product is scheduled to be released on Wednesday, January 31st.
There is a single configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each box typically comes with 10 cards - 2 auto relics, 7 autos, and 1 relic. Seeing that some boxes are coming with 11 cards rather than 10, and seeing some boxes with all autos. The all auto box I saw included a cut auto, so that may end up being in place of a relic. In 2021, Topps sold boxes online for $2K and in 2022 Topps sold boxes online for $3K. It’s pretty interesting that for the 2022 product, they went straight to online only and did not allocate anything to their Topps direct customers (outside of perhaps a few of the biggest breakers/LCS’s). In hindsight, this looks to have been the beginning of the blueprint for stratifying the haves and have nots exemplified through their Fanatics Live partner program. They look to be repeating that with the 2023 version of Diamond Icons and I expect more and more of the high-end and short printed, desirable products to follow this same blueprint. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for $3,199.99 with a customer limit of 15. They are selling Cases of Hobby boxes (2 boxes per case) with zero discount at $6,399.98 with a customer limit of 5.
The design isn’t really a driver of the product - it’s as usual with most high-end Topps products. A lot of gold, whites, grays, and blacks. Autos are all on card and relics are typically game-used. Even in this high end product, you will still get the disappointing single color jersey swatch, but you will also get some amazing patches. There is an extensive list of cut signatures as well. Finally, new this year is a PolychromatINK auto set - one Black themed and one White themed. The autos are using a variety of metallic inks - hopefully they give us a full rainbow of colors as it’s a nice change-up when we don’t get the standard blue sharpie. I’ve seen purple, gold, silver, red, and green so far, which are all somewhat standard secondary ink colors, but still better than nothing. I was hoping we’d get some uncommon colors like pink, yellow, orange, etc. One thing I am unfortunately seeing is that the strip on these cards separating the player name section from the main player photo and signature was put on after the cards were signed. So if any player’s signature went to far horizontally, it could get cut-off by the application of the strip post-signing. In addition, the black versions will have the name bar in black and I’ve already regularly seen condition issues with the black section.
The checklist is composed of rookies, current vets, and ex-MLB players. The rookie checklist contains Series 1 and 2 rookies, but isn’t including any of the Update Series rookies. All on-card autos typically extend the production cycle, so waiting to get the Update Series rookies into the product make it tough to turnaround the product (not that they delivered this iteration anywhere near what they’ve done in the past as this is usually a summer release). Fortunately the Series 1 and 2 rookies are the strength of the 2023 products with Corbin Carroll, Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Anthony Volpe, Jordan Walker, Triston Casas, Michael Harris II, Francisco Álvarez, Kodai Senga, Masataka Yoshida, and others. With this high-end of a product, the vets and ex-MLB players are some of the better ones, including Ohtani, Trout, Acuña, Harper, Jeter, Ichiro, Ripken, and others.
One of the better checklists, all on card autos and game used relics, and no base cards are a great product - unfortunately Topps charges an arm and a leg and whatever other body part you want throw in there for it. I don’t own any Diamond Icons cards, but one day I probably will go out of my way to pick up a PC single or a bottom feed a cheap card. But buying into breaks (currently $350 hit drafts are happening with the Fanatics Live crew) or buying personal boxes (LOL) aren’t anything I ever plan on doing as I prefer not to take the high risk, high reward gambles.