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 and one pre-order. The releases are 2024 Bowman’s Best, 2024 Bowman Draft Sapphire, 2024 Topps Transcendent, and 2024 Panini Prizm Baseball White Sparkle packs. The pre-order is 2025 Topps Series 1.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2025 Topps Series 1 Pre-Order
The first official product of 2025 and when we get the first True Rookie Cards of the 2025 class, 2025 Topps Series 1 goes on pre-order on Monday, January 13th.
There are multiple different configurations available for pre-order. A regular Hobby box comes with either one auto or relic and will be available for $89.99. Cases of regular Hobby boxes (12 boxes per case) will be available for $1,079.99. Jumbo Hobby boxes comes with three hits with one guaranteed auto and typically two relics as the remaining hits and will be available for $179.99. Cases of Jumbo Hobby boxes (6 boxes per case) will be available for $1,079.99. Mega boxes have no guaranteed hits but do have exclusive 35th anniversary 1990 Topps design foil cards. Cases of Mega boxes (20 boxes per case) will be available for $999.99. Finally, Topps is doing a combo with one regular Hobby box plus one Blaster/Value box for $109.99. This essentially gets you a Blaster box for $20 with the Hobby box being $90 by itself, so that is not a bad deal as long as you are good with the Hobby box price. Blaster boxes are being advertised as coming with exclusive Holo parallels. Last year, Blaster exclusives were Holiday parallels, but those look unlikely to be included in 2025 Flagship products.
The design has now been in front of us for about a week or so. I’ll reserve final judgement for when I have it in hand, and also when I see it in chrome, but at the moment I’m underwhelmed. When you unbalance a design, it better have some serious standout elements. The racetrack element really sends my eyes to the bottom left corner every time I look at pictures of it, and that’s not the intended result. If it is, that’s not a great decision. The position graphic in the bottom right handed corner is also a bit concerning as it’s looked low-res in the pictures we’ve seen. Hopefully it looks better in hand. Home Field Advantage cards are back, and the 35th anniversary cards will be featuring the 1990 Topps design. Not a favorite of mine personally, but we’ll see what Topps does with it. Most famously from that set is the no-name error Frank Thomas rookie card which can sell for a pretty penny (a PSA 10 recently sold for close to $150K). Topps has redone this card as an insert back in 2010, but it be interesting to see if they short print some rookies in that insert with the player name missing.
The checklist is live as of Monday and the main rookies are Dylan Crews, James Wood, and Jacob Wilson. Jackson Jobe is included with autographs and an All Aces insert, but does not have a base card, meaning his True Rookie Card will not be until Series 2 in the summer.
More to come as we get closer to release week.
2024 Bowman’s Best
The popular mid-tier Bowman product is scheduled to release on Wednesday, January 15th.
There is only one format - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with four autos. Topps will be selling Hobby boxes for $279.99 on release day. According to Topps social media, this product will go the EQL raffle process for the ability to purchase. Last year they sold boxes for $299.99.
The design is the usual wild, non-traditional designs on chrome stock with on card autos. Relic auto insert cards and potentially multi-player autos will likely be sticker autos, however. The 1955 Bowman Anime cards that we’ve seen in other Bowman products is continued here including a Paul Skenes version. There’s usually one or more inserts in Bowman’s Best that really look cool, and of what I’ve seen so far, Showpieces gives us a very artistic paint splatter feel that I like.
The checklist is comprised of prospects, rookies, vets, with prospect autos tending to be the easiest to pull. In years past, we usually get a fair amount of the current MLB Draft players that debut in Bowman Draft and then immediately show up in Bowman’s Best. This year, that representation seems lower than I remember, and makes for a less exciting product. But that just may be me having an old-man memory. It’s not like I’m going to do the work to ACTUALLY compare the current checklist versus year’s past. Anyways, we do have Bazzana, Burns, Caglianone, Kurtz, Griffin, Rainer, and Moore to name the prominent ones.
Years ago, or perhaps it’s easier to say, $100 less or even more per box ago, this was a product I was more than happy to participate in breaks for. Random team or PYT breaks weren’t bad value. Nowadays, the ROI for personal rips is pretty bad, and in breaks it’s not much better. This has transitioned into the aftermarket singles-only territory.
2024 Bowman Draft Sapphire Edition
The desirable Sapphire Edition of 2024 Bowman Draft will be available on Friday, January 17th.
There is one configuration - a regular Hobby box. It comes with one auto and three color parallels per box. On Thursday, December 12th, pre-orders were available to Topps 582 Montgomery Club members at $449.99 per box with a limit of one box per membership. Pre-orders were never made available to the general public. Topps listed the price point on social media as TBA for this coming Friday (To Be Announced). ***Update - Topps is now listing this as an EQL Raffle for Friday.
The design is the base Bowman design given the Sapphire treatment. There is one insert that we’ve grown use to seeing in Sapphire products - Sapphire Selections, that comes in both base and auto versions. Autos are all on card.
The base checklist remains the same as Bowman Draft, while the autograph list is significantly shortened. You get all of the Tier 1 players with Bazzana, Rainer, Griffin, Kurtz, and Moore and a nice helping of Tier 2 players with Caglianone, Cam Smith, Hagen Smith, Burns, Montgomery, Payne, Burkholder, Lindsey, Waldschmidt, Tyson Lewis, and Yesavage.
I can’t imagine this will be cheap, especially with Topps deciding not to mention the price point. Even if it just matched the pre-order pricing, that’s still vomit-inducing. Sadly one of my favorite products, Bowman Draft, in any format nowadays is simply way out of my price range (please bring back Lite boxes!). At best I’ll pick up singles, but it won’t be any time soon.
2024 Topps Transcendent Baseball
The highest end of all high end products, 2024 Topps Transcendent will be going live through the EQL raffle process on Tuesday, January 14th. Interestingly, sites like Blowout and Beckett still have January 22nd listed as the release date.
There is one format - a “regular” Hobby box. The format is significantly changed again this year, as the cards per box drops all the way down to 42 cards per box. Likewise, the price point has dropped way down. Typically boxes were in the high teens to mid twenty thousand dollar ranges in the past. Topps didn’t even give the “TBA” tag to the price like Bowman Draft Sapphire on social media this week. Blowout currently has boxes just under $8K at the moment, which probably means we are going to see them come in anywhere from $6K - $8K. ***Update - as with all raffles, price points aren’t shown on the Topps website, but the rumors are that this came in at $6K (likely $5,999.99). The box contents are as follows for 2024:
- 4 Transcendent Icons Chrome 8-card packs for a total of 32 cards, with autos possible, but not guaranteed
- 2 Autograph Cards
- 2 Autograph Patch Cards
- 2 Rookie Autograph or Rookie Autograph Patch
- 2 Autograph Relic Cards
- 1 Jumbo Patch Relic, Dual Patch Card, or Triple Patch Card
- 1 Additional Hit
- Rare MLB Logo Patch Autographs or Oversized Cut Signatures
- Randomly inserted VIP Event Invitation. Limited to 100.
The design is super high end with various inspirations of past Topps designs depending on the cards. It is strange to see a Shohei Ohtani auto relic card numbered to 10 using a plain white jersey relic in their marketing material - that honestly should not be in the product, let alone in the marketing material, for their highest end baseball product.
The checklist has not yet been announced. The set is usually comprised of rookies, vets, and ex-MLB players. The marketing material has teased Derek Jeter, Wyatt Langford, Jackson Holliday, Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, Mariano Rivera, Bobby Witt Jr., and Aaron Judge.
I like the approach that Topps has taken here, dropping the price out of the complete, free-flowing nosebleed range into just a steady trickle nosebleed range. While it makes sense to cut down the cards in the product because of this, making the VIP invitation, typically the most bankable value in the product, not guaranteed is an interesting twist. I doubt it changes how the product is treated this time around with likely a strong checklist, but in the future, if it stays this way, I could see it being a tougher sell. As always, this is not a product for the faint of heart.
2024 Panini Prizm Baseball White Sparkle Packs
Panini White Sparkle packs are often high risk, high reward bonus packs that are sought after in the licensed football and basketball world. With baseball, that demand has never been a big thing. Each pack comes with three white sparkle cards using the 2024 Panini Prizm Baseball base checklist. There are no autos in these packs. Panini is going to use the dutch auction format, starting at 12 PM EST on Tuesday, January 14th. The drop price starts at $250 per pack, with a floor price of $50 per pack. Even at the floor price, that is a lot more than I am willing to pay. I’d be shocked if the auction doesn’t make it to the floor. Good luck to any who decide to get into this product beyond singles.