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 three scheduled release and one pre-order. We have 2024 Topps Allen & Ginter and two releases from companies that I don’t always trust release dates on (Onyx and the new Pulse brand) - 2024 Onyx Vintage Extended Series Baseball and 2024 Pulse Baseball Futures Edition. 2024 Topps Holiday will go on pre-order on the Topps website this week as well.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Topps Allen & Ginter
The most eclectic of baseball products, 2024 Topps Allen & Ginter is scheduled to release on Wednesday, October 30th.
This product was on the Topps website for pre-order on Tuesday, October 1st. Hobby boxes were $124.99 and Cases of Hobby boxes (12 boxes per case) were $1,499.99. Topps will be selling Hobby boxes for $129.99 on the go live date. Each Hobby box comes with three hits - autos are not guaranteed and most Hobby boxes will typically be three relics, or two relics and one auto. There should be various retail formats, primarily value/blaster boxes, but I’ve seen cello packs in the past as well. ***Update - As expected, this went live with Hobby boxes at $129.99, Cases of Hobby boxes at $1,559.99, and Value/Blaster boxes for $24.99.
The design is always hearkening back to an old-timey feel as Allen & Ginter originated as a tobacco/cigarette brand that was making cards as far back as 1880. It’s a full off-white border with classic brown/yellow palette with black accents and text throughout. You tend to see A&G designs from year to year and it’s immediately identifiable as A&G. Autos will often be of the framed variety with the actual card being autographed is a mini card that gets framed in. There are also base mini cards and inserts that will come in mini sizes as well. New this year are authentic line ups cut up and inset into cards. The player whose name appears on the lineup card will have a sticker auto on the card, and since this is the first year, I imagine these will be popular. Last year, the Chrome version of Allen & Ginter went missing in action, and this year, chrome A&G cards are now inserts into the standard Allen & Ginter product, essentially telling us that A&G chrome will not be a thing for the foreseeable future. The final thing to mention are Rip cards, where you can rip open a card and get a mini card within. There will as usual also be double rip cards that come with oversized box loader cards. Rip cards used to be exclusive to A&G, adding further uniqueness to the product. Now that there is a standalone Rip product, it has become less of a novelty.
The checklist is the full group of rookie chases, and will also include current and ex-MLB players. The real draw is the non-baseball subjects. Whether that’s animals or ballpark food or celebrities or non-baseball athletes, there can be a ton of value and/or a ton of fun in that respect. The first autographed trading card of Usain Bolt, the current world record holder for the 100 meter sprint, will be a strong chase in this year’s product. Jayden Daniels autographs will also be found here, and he is turning out to be an absolute stud rookie quarterback. His cards should be really hot. Check out the full checklist over at Beckett to find more info on the multitude of options in the checklist.
I enjoy Allen & Ginter - it’s a really fun rip. I don’t really enjoy personal box rips because of the odds heavily weighted towards pulling relics rather than autos. If you are in the personal case rips, this might be a good one to do. If you are into breaks, getting the non-baseball team spot, if it’s available in that format, is almost always the option to target. I like picking up a blaster box or two, and then buying cheap eclectic autos in the singles market once it cools off.
2024 Onyx Vintage Extended Series
The second half of the flagship Onyx Vintage series, 2024 Onyx Vintage Extended Series is scheduled to release on Thursday, October 31st.
There are two formats - a regular Hobby box and a Mega Hobby box. Onyx does not have any details on their website, so details are all from secondary sources. Hobby boxes should come with 4 autos per box, while Mega Hobby boxes should come with 10 autos per box. Currently Blowout is selling Hobby boxes for $124.95 and Mega boxes for $189.95.
The design is what we saw in the spring release of 2024 Onyx Vintage series with a classic, full border design. All autographs will be on card. As it’s an unlicensed product, there will not be any logos or team names on the cards.
The checklist is focused on prospects, amateurs, a couple of active players, a few ex-MLB players, and one non-player with player agent Scott Boras. The big chases are going to be Paul Skenes, Jackson Chourio, and number one pick in the 2024 MLB Draft Travis Bazzana.
I really enjoy Onyx products because you can get small checklist with on card autos for cheap. Typically I’m used to paying $40 - $50 to rip a box of Onyx with two guaranteed autos. Now that the amount of autos has doubled and the price has more than doubled for a regular Hobby box in 2024, and I’m not interested in shelling out close to $200 to get the price per auto back to pre-2024 levels with a Mega box, I’m sadly out for personal box ripping. If you are in to spending the money, definitely go with the Mega box format. Otherwise, it’s the singles market to grab cheap singles.
2024 Pulse Baseball Future EditioN
The new prospect-focused product is scheduled to release on Wednesday, October 30th, although like most unlicensed product manufacturers, I’d wait to see it before I believe it. They’ve literally not posted any of their own content to their social media since mid-July and outside of the sell sheet, they don’t have anything on their website about the product. With this being their second ever product, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for this release date, but you never know. There looks to be only one format, a regular Hobby box, that comes with five autos (no base cards), with one of those autos being an encased card. The price on Blowout currently is $129.95 per box. The autos all look to be on card. The concept is that the encased auto will be from prospects that appeared at the 2024 MLB Futures Game during All-Star weekend, and I assume you may find them in the non-encased set as well, but we shall see. Autos teased on the sell sheet and socials are Spencer Jones, Xavier Isaac, Coby Mayo, James Wood, Evan Carter, Junior Caminero, and Samuel Basallo. I’d anticipate a fair amount of carryover signers from their first ever product early this year - 2024 Pulse Baseball. I think this is an easy product to avoid outside of buying cheap singles until we see a reason to hop on board.
2024 Topps Holiday
Already available via pre-order on the Dick’s Sporting Goods website a few weeks back, Topps is now doing a pre-order of their own on their website on Thursday, October 31st. On their social, they’ve only listed the Mega box for pre-order, which is the traditional format that comes with one relic or auto or auto-relic per box, with the odds heavily weighted towards the relic. The pre-order price will be $29.99 per Mega Box. There is a new format for 2024, a Mega Tin, that does not guarantee any hits, but does come with various variations and parallels. We shall see if that is available for pre-order as well when Thursday rolls around. ***Update - the pre-order went live on Thursday with Mega Boxes for $29.99 and cases of Mega Boxes (20 boxes per case) for $599.99. In addition, a new format was revealed and also went up for pre-order - an Advent Calendar format. The Advent Calendar box is available for $39.99 while cases sold out in less than 10 minutes. They are 8 boxes per case and it looks like the pre-order price was $319.99. The Advent Calendar checklist on the Topps site only includes the base checklist plus the Making the Nice List and the Evergreen inserts. According to Topps, the Advent Calendar guarantees 20 exclusive five card packs, 1 three card evergreen pack, 2 single card foil buyback card packs, and 1 original buyback pack. The buyback packs likely are in place of relics/autos that you could hit in Mega boxes, but we shall see if the Advent Calendar exclusive packs contain any of those hits as well once they are in hands.