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 releases - 2024 Bowman Draft, 2024 Topps Allen & Ginter X, and 2024 Onyx Rips Baseball Collection. In addition, there is one pre-order on the schedule - 2024 Topps Luminaries.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Bowman Draft
The third and final installment of the Bowman products that focuses almost exclusively on current year draft picks, 2024 Bowman Draft is scheduled to go live on Wednesday, December 4th.
There are three configurations - a regular Hobby box, a Jumbo Hobby box, and an HTA Choice box. The regular Hobby box comes with 3 autos and Topps pre-sold them for $519.99 with cases of Hobby Boxes (8 boxes per case) for $4,159.99. Topps has announced that they will be selling Hobby boxes for $529.99. Jumbo Hobby boxes come with 5 autos and Topps pre-sold them for $739.99 and cases of Jumbo Hobby boxes (6 boxes per case) for $4,439.99. HTA Choice Hobby boxes comes with 3 autos per box with no other cards in the box. Topps did not make HTA Choice boxes available for pre-order, and they will not likely make them available for sale to the general public. Blowout currently has them for sale at $749.95. ***Update - the product went live as expected with Hobby boxes for sale at the announced price of $529.99. Cases of Hobby boxes (8 boxes per case) are $4,239.99. Jumbo Hobby boxes are $749.99 and cases of Jumbos (6 boxes per case) are $4,499.99. HTA choice are not available direct from Topps, as expected.
The design is what we’ve seen from Bowman, so no need to jump into a discussion of the base design. For the inserts, the one that looks to be potentially the most popular is the In Action insert. It is a die-cut design that looks like it is an action figure in its package that can be hung on a retail shelf. Autos are on card, although image variation autos will be stickers. Also keep in mind that image variations will not include the 1st Bowman logo.
The checklist is all broken down for the 1st Bowman prospects in our 2024 Bowman Draft Preview. Sadly we’ve now seen that Zyhir Hope’s cards do NOT have the 1st Bowman logo, which was a question up until Monday evening when his cards started to show up on eBay. I disagree with this decision by Topps, especially since they, for whatever reason, did not pack out his autos outside of his My First Bowman Autograph Blue Refractor numbered 1 out of 150 and his Red Lava Refractor autos numbered out of 5 (so far only two of the five have surfaced, so this is an assumption that all five were packed out). At this point, we don’t know why this has happened, but in theory a top 25 prospect in baseball may have only six total 1st Bowman cards in general circulation. If that is what ends up happening, it is absolutely wild for so many reasons. We’ve seen a few “easter eggs” as Topps has been posting to socials as well as Fanatics Live breakers opening cards. First is that according to Topps, one in fifty Jumbo boxes will have a bonus “Variety" pack. Each Variety pack contains four base parallels - popcorn, sunflower seeds, bubble gum, and peanuts. You can also hit rare autos with numbered out of five with the Variety parallel style. The second easter egg is from breaks currently ongoing, with a John Elway Yankees Bowman card in the vein of the Bowman Cards that never were like Tom Brady’s in 2023 Bowman Draft. Elway was drafted by the Yankees in 1981, and played for their Single-A team that year. In 1982 he was chosen in the NFL draft, and never played professional baseball again. Secondly, there were no retrofractors on the checklist, but we have seen at least one with a Reggie Jackson A’s of the Kansas City variety retrofractor so far.
This is arguably the biggest prospect product release every year and the one I prefer amongst the three Bowman flagship products as it does not include any non-prospects in the base checklist. Sadly the price point continues to go up and up. We had a few years where Bowman Draft Lite boxes gave us an opportunity to rip boxes at a palatable price, but that only lasted a few years before disappearing. At this point, it’s a singles and breaking product, which is fine, but I’d love to see a cheaper way into one of the best products every year.
2024 Topps Allen & Ginter X
The baseball-only, blacked out version of Allen & Ginter, 2024 Topps Allen & Ginter X is scheduled for release on Friday, December 6th.
There is only one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with one auto and Topps will be selling it for $149.99. This is more than double the price of 2023, when these boxes were $69.99. Outside of a different checklist and Topps believing the demand is there for an elevated price point, there’s no obvious reason as to why Topps more than doubled the price. ***Update - this went on sale as expected with Hobby boxes priced at $149.99 and cases of Hobby boxes (12 boxes per case) at $1,799.99. Both formats sold out in less than an hour.
The design is the same as the regular Allen & Ginter release but it is a blacked out theme. With chrome cards integrated into the both the normal as well as Allen & Ginter X release, the chrome versions of Allen & Ginter X could be highly sought after. Autos are typically on card and done in Silver and Gold (parallel) ink colors, which is another nice touch.
The checklist is essentially identical to the full release for base, chrome and autos, but there are no inserts, which is one of the many components that makes Allen & Ginter the most eclectic release on a yearly basis. That does make it lose some of its charm.
When this product was under $100, it was pretty much an insta-buy. Now that it is well over that price point, it is a pass for personal box rips and now transitions to a singles and breaks product.
2024 Onyx Rips Baseball Collection
New for 2024 (unless I missed this somehow last year), 2024 Onyx Rips Baseball Collection is scheduled to release on Friday, December 6th.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. The box comes with 32 cards total, 5 of which will be autos. Currently boxes are being sold for $129.95 on Blowout.
The design is a strange diagonal paper rip cutting across the card, with the lower section being the background of the actual player action shot, and the upper section being a white-ish gray with the product logo and player information. I’m not a huge fan of this design as that amount of blank space is not my favorite. The name itself “Rips” also seems strange, but it does make the design more obvious as to why it was chosen - as if the the photo was “ripped diagonally in half”.
The checklist is primarily prospects, with a few prospects that are still in the “amateur” ranks such as Jace Laviolette (won’t be drafted until future years), the NL rookie of the year in Paul Skenes, and two ex-MLB legends in Pedro Martinez and Frank Thomas. A lot of good prospect names to chase here with Roman Anthony, Travis Bazzana, Nick Kurtz, Chase Burns, Hagen Smith, Charlie Condon, Leo De Vries, Walker Jenkins, and plenty of others. Cut autos will also be a thing here, and that might be a first for Onyx, at least in recent memory.
While you’re getting 5 autos for roughly $25 a pop, which makes for a great value proposition, everything else about this product seems like a shoulder shrug. The name, for better or worse, has been closely used by Topps in Allen & Ginter as well as their own standalone product Topps Rip. When I heard this product name, I immediately wondered if it would have the Topps Rip gimmick of having a card inside of a card that would require you to rip open the primary card to get to the secondary card. Turns out this product does not have that approach, but the fact that I thought of it immediately implies a less than ideal marketing decision by Onyx for this product’s name. I have found it harder and harder over the years to pay more than $100 for personal rips of unlicensed products, even if the value per auto was very reasonable as we see here. Break it down into the format that we’ve seen plenty of from Onyx, which is two autos per box for $40 - $50, and I’d be much more willing to buy a fun personal box. I do see this as another attempt at going with a more traditional Hobby box approach, similar to what Leaf has typically done over the years with their unlicensed baseball products. For me, those Leaf products were almost always case breaks and singles products, and this is essentially what I feel like is the case here. It’s a relatively strong checklist, so I wouldn’t mind anyone trying this out, but I doubt I will be doing so myself.
2024 Topps Luminaries Pre-Order
The high-end, one card per box product went on pre-order on Tuesday, December 3rd and quickly sold out. The scheduled release date is January 3rd, 2025. As mentioned, each box comes with one card, typically an auto or auto relic card in a one touch/magnetic case sealed with a Luminaries sticker. The pre-order price for the Hobby box was $359.99 and for cases of Hobby boxes (6 boxes per case) was $2,159.99. The checklist is full of ex-MLB players, current vets, and a sprinkling of rookies, including the chase rookies like Paul Skenes, the Jackson 3, Junior Caminero, Elly De La Cruz, Jasson, Wyatt Langford, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The primary player missing is Shota Imanaga. More to come when the product is released.