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 four scheduled releases - 2024 Topps Chrome Update, 2024 Panini Impeccable Baseball, 2024 Topps Holiday Baseball, and 2024 Press Pass Premium Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Topps Chrome Update
The second installment of the Topps Chrome Flagship product, 2024 Topps Chrome Update is scheduled to go live on Wednesday, November 13th.
At one point, Chrome Update was just a retail product, but has now fully evolved into a standalone product with all of the various configurations that you will also find with the Chrome release. There are three hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box, a Jumbo Hobby box, and an HTA Hobby box. The regular Hobby box comes with 1 auto and was sold at pre-order for $149.99. The Jumbo Hobby box comes with 3 autos and was sold at pre-order for $379.99. HTA Hobby boxes come with two autos and was not available for pre-order. There should be various formats of retail, although the odds sheet only shows a Mega box which won’t guarantee any hits, but will have exclusives such as various green parallels, raywave parallels, and the Diamond Dominance insert. ***Update - the release occurred as scheduled on Wednesday. Hobby boxes are $199.99, Jumbo Hobby boxes are $419.99, and Mega Boxes (retail) are $49.99. Cases of each format all sold out immediately. A Hobby box case (6 boxes per case) were $1,199.99, a Jumbo Hobby box case (8 boxes per case) were $3359.99, and a Mega box case (20 boxes per case) were $999.99.
The design is what we’ve already seen from the Chrome Flagship earlier this year. One of the biggest chases, added last year, is the one of one MLB debut patch auto cards. The first game of an MLB players career now gets a special MLB patch on their jersey sleeve, which is then sent to Topps and used for these cards. Last year, they were redemptions to prevent boxes from being weighed, to preserve the condition of the card, and likely they didn’t have a majority of them ready to go since it was a new card/process for Topps. No word yet if it will be the same this year, but we’ve already seen various cards shown in marketing images and one in a video - that of Shota Imanaga where he signs his name in Kanji as an added bonus. A new insert teased by Topps are the MLB Illustrations cards - an artistic take of the player in two poses on the card that are short printed. According to Topps, they will fall one in 16, 906 packs and will have a base version and a superfractor one of one version.
The checklist is stacked now that we are at the end of the year. Just like recent years, Topps has shortened the checklist from regular Flagship - it’s not a direct compliment in Chrome form. This concentrates the checklist to more chase players, with all of the desirable rookies here - Paul Skenes, Jackson Merrill, Jackson Chourio, Jackson Holliday, Wyatt Langford, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, and many more. While the checklist from Topps does not list out if there are rookie debut cards in this checklist as we are used to seeing, various rookies will show up twice in the base checklist. That implies we will be getting a base card and a rookie debut card for these rookies. Legend autos have also been heavily marketed and will be chased by various collectors. Getting legends in a flagship product with an auto on a base design, especially when they are not easy to hit, has shown to be in-demand cards like we saw with Chrome earlier in the year. Multi-player autos have also been teased, and those at the least will be sticker autos. A fun dual auto with Bill Ripken and Jackson Holliday, who did his own version of the classic F-Face card back in Series 2 earlier this year, will now share a card. A triple auto of the Jackson 3 has also been teased - Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, and Jackson Merrill. That card has huge potential. The Helix cards, a Topps color blast imitation, also are listed and should be big hits, but I’ve honestly forgotten that Topps even did this in Chrome, so that should tell you something.
This is going to be a REALLY popular product given the strength of the checklist. The Sapphire Edition of this product likely will show up in a month or two and further drive the frenzy. I think it’s a safe assumption these products, and any breaks with them, are going to have high prices and high demand. I’m likely staying away unless I run across some retail products on the shelves, but if you are going to go ham on a product in 2024, this is likely one of the best places to do it.
2024 Panini Impeccable Baseball
The unlicensed high-end, first year (at least for baseball) product is scheduled to go live on Wednesday, November 13th.
There are two formats - a regular Hobby box and a 1st Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box. A regular Hobby box comes with 5 autographs on average. Blowout is currently selling these boxes for $500. I imagine Panini will be somewhat close to that, perhaps around $475 if they go any lower than Blowout. The 1st Off The Line format has an exclusive Emerald Parallel auto numbered out of 4, but otherwise should be the same as the regular Hobby box. It went through the Dutch Auction process last week with a ceiling of $800 and a floor of $500. As far as I know, it hit the floor. There are no retail versions of this product. ***Update - Panini released this as scheduled on Wednesday at $500 a box.
The design is primarily a classic white with only the player shown (no backgrounds), some design elements of a thin line and thin-lined rectangles doing some inner-border type of work, and swatches of artistic colors, almost like a paint brush effect. The cards look good, but they are unlicensed, which will always hold them back. The Canvas Creations set look great. As we’ve seen in the Impeccable branded products in football and basketball, there are also going to be silver metal relic cards that contain one troy ounce of silver - these are really collectable, but we’ll see how they do with unlicensed cards.
The checklist is primarily composed of players that had yet to debut prior to 2024 and ex-MLB players. Panini has surprisingly added more MLB players that debuted prior to 2024 than I recall seeing in previous 2024 releases. Those include Elly De La Cruz, Bobby Witt, Jr., Evan Carter, Aaron Judge, Gunnar Henderson, Jordan Lawlar, Nolan Schanuel, Masataka Yoshida, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Heston Kjerstad, etc. The prospect list also has desirable names in it like Andrew Painter, Dylan Crews, Paul Skenes, Jackson Merrill, Jackson Chourio, Ethan Salas, Leo De Vries, and plenty of others.
There is absolutely no reason for Panini to produce high end baseball products in a completely unlicensed situation. Even when they had the MLBPA license and were able to use the majority of current MLB players in a product, I questioned why they made high end products like Flawless and National Treasures. Now completely unlicensed, I have to wonder what the motivation for this was. It’s not like it was a product that they’ve made in the past, where there’s more logic to keep making it. I would recommend avoiding this product completely from box ripping and breaks unless you can find strong deals on it. If there was some reason I wanted cards from this product, I’d wait a few months and just buy the singles at that point.
2024 Topps Holiday Baseball
The retail product celebrating the winter holidays is scheduled to go live on Friday, November 15th.
There are three formats, two of which are new for 2024. The traditional Mega box format guarantees one hit per box which is typically a memorabilia card, but can be an auto or auto relic card. These boxes were available for $29.99 at pre-order. The first new format is a Mega Tin. It does not guarantee any hits, and if you believe the odds sheet, it’s not possible to land any hits with this format. It does guarantee an image variation and a few exclusive parallels. These were available for pre-order at Dick’s Sporting Goods (and perhaps elsewhere) for $17.99. The second new format is an Advent Calendar. The odds sheet shows absolutely nothing for this format. According to Topps, you will get 20 exclusive 5 card packs, 1 pack of 3 evergreen cards, two packs containing one buyback card each, and one original buyback pack. What that all means, especially with the buyback packs, remains to be seen. These were sold for $39.99 at pre-order on the Topps website and sold out a lot quicker than the Mega boxes.
The design is based on the Paper Flagship design, but given the Holiday treatment. Given the marketing images, they’ve really leaned into that theme, which I absolutely love. Elves, stockings, wreaths, Santa Claus, snow, winter motifs - this product has it all. No auto cards have been teased, but typically autos in this product are stickers. We shall see what the buyback cards are all about as that seems to be a big design wild card at the moment.
The checklist is active players - rookies and vets, and it is of the late season variety, so we get all the chase rookies - Skenes, the Jackson 3, Langford, Imanaga, Yamamoto, Elly, Jasson, etc.
I love this product, and I wish it hadn’t gotten so popular these last few years, as it’s made it difficult to find when popping over to my local Target (or Walmart when it used to be a Wally World exclusive). I’m going to have to start biting the bullet and ordering it online and paying the shipping costs sadly, but this years product looks so good and the checklist is so strong, it’s likely worth it. If you want to have fun ripping a product and you don’t associate with the holiday-haters out there, I highly recommend this. If you want to rip for value, it’s not a bad idea given the checklist. This year, of all years, is not one to let this product pass you by.
2024 Press Pass Premium Baseball
This was covered in last week’s This Week in Baseball Cards as it was originally scheduled for release on Friday, November 8th. Check that post if you want more info (what little there is of it).