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 Topps Series 2, 2024 Topps Dynamic Duals, and 2024 Wild Card Rookies & Prospects.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week. This post may be briefer than usual as I work on an abbreviated 2024 Topps Series 2 Product Preview.
2024 Topps Series 2
The second installment of the Topps Flagship product is scheduled to release on Wednesday, June 12th.
There are two Hobby formats a regular Hobby box and a Jumbo Hobby (a.k.a. HTA Jumbo) box. A regular Hobby box guarantees one auto OR relic with the odds heavily weighted towards the relic. The Jumbo Hobby box guarantees one auto AND two relics per box. Topps ran a pre-sale on May 14th - Hobby boxes were $84.99 and Hobby cases (12 boxes per case) were $1,019.99. Jumbo Hobby boxes were $179.99 and Jumbo cases (6 boxes per case) were $1.079.99. There are quite a lot of retail formats, from loose pack retail boxes to fat packs to hangers to hanger packs (packs you might see in grocery stores or gas stations or hardware stores), value/blaster boxes, fanatics exclusive blaster boxes (1 aqua parallel per pack), monster boxes, giant boxes, etc. ***Update - Topps released Series 2 on their website as expected on Wednesday. Hobby boxes were $89.99, cases of Hobby boxes (12 boxes per case) were $1.079.99, value/blaster boxes were $24.99, Jumbo Hobby boxes were $189.99, and cases of Jumbo Hobby boxes (6 boxes per case) were $1,139.99.
The design is what we’ve seen already in Series 1 - nothing much to dive into here. Inserts are mostly different, although you will get the standard Stars of the MLB and the more desirable Home Field Advantage (HFA) inserts carrying over. There are plenty of other inserts specific to Series 2 - First Pitch/Play Ball inserts likely will be very popular. In addition, there is a Women in Baseball insert on the odds list that Topps did not include in the checklist - I hope that the omission in the checklist was a mistake and we do get this insert, but we shall see. Overall, none of the teased insert designs were anything that jumped out to me as a must-have.
The checklist has been released and it’s the standard fare. We did get some desirable rookies that did not get base cards but did get autos - Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, Jackson Merrill, and Wyatt Langford. A few days after the checklist dropped, Topps Ripped then dropped a small bomb that we are getting three of these rookies as base short prints - similar to the J-Rod/Witt/Tork SP’s in 2022 and the famous Bat Down Acuña Jr. in 2018. And as of Monday morning, I’ve now seen the Jackson Holliday base short print as well on social media from people that have gotten their hands on the product early, making it the Big 4 all getting into the mix. The Holliday Short Print is an homage to the famous Billy Ripken F Face card which is a great touch and likely adds even more desirability to the card. Other rookies with base rookie cards that will be chases include Junior Caminero, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, and Jung Hoo Lee primary among them.
Without the base Short Print chases, I felt this release was lacking the punch it needed to drive Hobby interest. With those four Short Prints chases added in, I think we will see quite a bit of interest in chasing those cards. I’ll dive into all of the rookies with base cards (plus the Jacksons and Langford) in Product Preview on release day.
2024 Topps Dyanmic Duals
The online exclusive featuring dual autographed cards is scheduled to release on Monday, June 10th.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with one Dual auto, two inserts, two parallels, and 20 base cards (there are 50 base cards total in the product). One box in ten (essentially one per case) will come with a premium dual auto card which are on card autos, as opposed to sticker autos for the non-premium autos. Last year Topps sold these boxes for $150 each. No price is publicly known as of writing for the 2024 edition. ***Update - Topps went live as expected with box prices at $164.99 and case prices (10 boxes per case) at $1,599.99.
The design is pretty similar to last year’s version, but there is a bit more going on and more color. It starts with the same classic white base and gold trim and filigree elements. The main differences, at least with the autos, is that the players are sequestered into their own quarter circles and then a central band runs horizontally across the middle of the card with a checkerboard pattern of interlocking Double D’s (for the two D’s of Dynamic Duals). ***The Revered Rookies insert that we got our first look at when the product went live looks great - as always, I’m a sucker for city skyline tie-ins, and to do it with rookies is even better.
The checklist is a mix of rookies, vets, and former MLB players. Sadly the base card that would have made this product absolutely fly off the shelves did not get an auto version - the Ohtani/Yamamoto Dodger dual. There will be some fun ones to chase though - the Adley/Gunnar Premium Orioles dual auto, the Jasson/Soto Yankees dual auto, the Jeter/Judge Premium Yankees dual auto, Harper/Trout Premium dual auto, and others.
I always tell myself I’ll bargain hunt some cheap dual autos or even cool inserts or base cards after the hype dies down post-release and never do. There are just so many products, and so little time (and money), and this is one of the many products that I think suffers from that in the hobby. Being released right before a major release (Series 2) won’t help either. And while this should be a product breakers would love, the mutli-team cards and the lack of hits for some teams makes it hard to constantly fill breaks for this product outside of a few of the bigger breakers with rabid buyers. I’ll try and remember this year to bargain hunt singles in the aftermarket, but I say that every year so I guess we shall see.
2024 Wild Card Matte Rookies & Prospects
The Junk Wax Era brand re-appeared a few years ago in the football and basketball card arena, and are now expanding out to baseball. 2024 Wild Card Matte Rookies & Prospects is its first foray since the return and is scheduled to release on Friday, June 14th. Wild Card themselves do not list this product on their website, so all information here comes from distribution channels (meaning it may not be 100% accurate).
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. It comes with five autographed cards per box - there are no base/non-auto cards in the product. Currently Blowout is selling boxes for $139.95. It is unlikely that we see a retail format of this product given the auto-only nature.
The design is relatively straight forward and I would assume the cards have a matte finish given the product name. The marketing images don’t show 100% whether the autos are on card or sticker autos. Given what I’ve seen from the football I’ve watched opened in the past year or so, it’s likely most if not all will be sticker autos. Encased autos are shown in some of the marketing images, but not all. It’s likely there will be a mixture of encased and not encased, but we shall see.
The checklist is focused on “rookies and prospects” but there are also some current and ex-players as well. That x-player list is a small one - David Ortiz, Nolan Ryan, Jose Canseco, and Buster Posey. The current players that debuted prior to 2024 are highlighted by Mookie Betts, Anthony Volpe, Corbin Carroll, Riley Greene, and Triston Casas. Highlights of the prospects (players that did not debut prior to 2024) are Jackson Chourio, Jackson Holliday, Jared Jones Paul Skenes, Spencer Jones, and Dylan Crews. There are also amateur players included with some big names like Charlie Condon, Nick Kurtz, Travis Bazzana, Vance Honeycutt, Chase Burns, Hagen Smith, Konnor Griffin, Derek Curiel, and Ethan Holliday.
An interesting alternative in the unlicensed space. I’m always skeptical until proven otherwise, but I’m willing to watch from the sidelines and see how juiced or not these boxes are. If they are all sticker autos, that is a bit of an added strike against the product as well. Definitely something to monitor, especially in the singles market over the next few months.