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 no scheduled releases, but there is a major product pre-sale for 2024 Topps Chrome.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week. ***Updated for the Topps Rickwood box set release.
2024 Topps Chrome Pre-Sale
On Monday, June 17th, Topps announced that 2024 Topps Chrome would be going on sale at 12 PM Eastern on Tuesday, June 18th with some details posted on their website here.
There are two Hobby configurations - a regular Hobby box and a Jumbo Hobby box. A regular Hobby box comes with 1 autograph and a Jumbo Hobby box comes with 3 autographs. Topps has yet to announce prices. According to the current landing page, Topps will be pre-selling Hobby boxes, Hobby cases, Jumbo Boxes, and Jumbo cases. Last year, Topps pre-sold Hobby boxes for $124.99 and for $149.99 at release. Topps pre-sold Jumbo boxes for $299.99 and $329.99 at release. Cases of these configurations were not sold on the Topps website last year. Topps also pre-sold Value/Blaster boxes for $34.99 and the same price at release. Fanatics pre-sold Monster boxes for $59.99 in 2023 on their website as well. We likely see Breaker Boxes again this year, which was a format introduced for Topps Chrome last year, but those were not sold to the general public. ****Update - The pre-sale went live at the expected time with the expected formats. Hobby boxes are $189.99 and cases of Hobby boxes (12 boxes per case) are $2,279.99. Jumbo Hobby boxes are $389.99 and cases of Jumbo Hobby boxes (8 boxes per case) are $3,119.99.
******Update - Topps has released the odds for the product, which shows us that Breaker’s Delight will in fact be back in 2024. In addition, there are added retail exclusive base parallels using the raywave design.
The design will be based off of the Topps Flagship (Series 1/Series 2/Update) design that we’ve already seen this year. Inserts will mostly be different from Flagship but will include the 1989 Topps Baseball throwbacks. We will see Radiating Rookies and Youthquake return this year, plus various other new inserts. Topps revealed on Monday as part of the news of the impending pre-sale that Elly De La Cruz would be on the cover of the box for 2024 Topps Chrome.
The checklist was released and it pretty much has every rookie we could be chasing. Elly De La Cruz, Jasson Dominguez, Junior Caminero, Jackson Chourio, Jackson Holliday, Jackson Merrill, Wyatt Langford, Evan Carter, and many, many more. Pretty much the only one not in the checklist released by Topps that is a major rookie chase is Paul Skenes. One note is that they are going from 220 base cards in 2023 to 300 base cards in the checklist in 2024, and adding another 25 rookie autos to bring the total from 129 to 154. *****Update - it looks like the MVP Buyback program will be back for this year’s edition of Topps Chrome. We will be getting last year’s MVP buybacks in this year’s edition - Ronald Acuña Jr. and Shohei Ohtani, although only Acuña Jr. will have buyback autos while both will have non-auto buyback cards. On the Jumbo Hobby boxes images on Topps’ website, there is a QR code printed on the box for the 2024 MVP Buyback program. As a reminder, once the 2024 MLB MVP’s are announced, you will be able to trade any cards from participating products, including 2024 Topps Chrome, for store credit at participating card shops and online card storefronts.
Topps Chrome is one of the most important baseball card releases every year. Sometimes the checklist lets it down, but that is definitely not the case this year. There are a ton of chases in the product with a bunch of Tier 1 and Tier 2 rookies. This helps the fact that they’ve added more cards to the base and rookie auto checklists which do the opposite of driving value since the product likely becomes more watered down. All in all, though, the checklist should drive a huge amount of interest.
2024 Topps MLB at Rickwood Negro League Collection
Topps has been selling individual Rickwood cards on their website over the past few weeks, and are now selling a complete set boxed version that went on sale on the day of the MLB game at Rickwood field - Thursday, June 20th. Topps is selling these boxes for $49.99.
The box contains all six cards done by former MLB player and current artist, Micah Johnson. These are base cards, and are not encased in sealed magnetic one touch cases that were being sold one by one throughout the past weeks. In addition to the base cards, each box will come with one exclusive encased card. This exclusive will either be an Artist Proof signed by Micah Johnson which looks to come in base, a black foil parallel numbered to 30, or a gold foil parallel 1/1, or it will be standard parallel of one of the six cards. There will be two parallels - an unnumbered black foil parallel or a gold foil 1/1 parallel.