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 two scheduled release s - 2024 Topps Archives and 2024 Topps Definitive. We also get the 2025 Topps Series 1 cover athlete reveal and release date. ***Update for the 2024 Panini Prizm Baseball Complete Set Premium Stock Dutch Auction.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2024 Topps Archives
The low-end product that primarily revisits baseball card designs of the past is scheduled to release on Wednesday, January 8th.
There is one Hobby format - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with two autos and Topps has announced they will be selling them for $129.99 per box. Last year Topps sold these for $134.99. There is also a cross between a retail and Hobby format, essentially like the Compact box we see with Stadium Club, called a Collector box. Last year these were sold as Tin lunch boxes, and it looks like that will be the case this year as well with more of a baseball card theme than last year. No price announced by Topps for this format as of Monday. Last year they sold these for $69.99. There will be the various retail formats including Blaster/Value boxes and Fat packs at the very least.
The design is based off of numerous Topps products of the past. The base design utilizes 1961 Topps, 1970 Topps, and 1994 Topps. Autos will primarily utilize 1968 Topps, 1983 Topps, 1995 Topps, and 2000 Topps. Inserts and variation and rare pulls will potentially use other designs as well. Autos are usually on card, and it’s likely to be so again this year.
The checklist is utilizing the full 2024 rookie set, so everyone we want to chase will be in the product. With Archives, we tend to get autographs with non-MLB players that are sometimes fun, sometimes valuable. This year we have signers like Buster Olney, Don Orsillo, Joe Buck, Ken Rosenthal, and Michael Kay.
Archives usually isn’t my thing because the auto checklist is so overpopulated with vets and ex-MLB players that just don’t get you close to making your money back on the boxes. Pulling Rafael Furcal and Chili Davis autos aren’t going to make many people happy. I do love the 1970 design, so that is a nice little bonus for me personally. However, that’s nowhere near enough to make me drop over $100 on a Hobby box, even if it is nice to see two on card autos for a semi-decent price. This is just another set where I’ll grab a blaster if I see it, and maybe value hunt some PC autos.
2024 Topps Definitive Collection
The high-end product is scheduled to release on Friday, January 10th.
There is one Hobby format - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with 6 autos and 2 relics for a total of 8 cards per box. Topps will be selling these boxes through their EQL raffle process at $1.999.99. This is the same price as last year.
The design is typical Definitive. Primarily white with gold logs and a thin inner border. Relics can be really nice, but for a high end product, we occasionally get disappointed with single color, white napkin style relics. Autos are on card, and usually there are no cards that are numbered higher than 50.
The checklist is not yet released, but it should have all the rookie chases in it. We’ve seen an Ohtani one of one framed auto that has both his typical Americanized signature as well as his Kanji signature on the card, and is being marketed as the first time that’s happened. In addition, we’ve seen Jackson Holliday and Pete Crow-Armstrong rookie autos teased.
I like this product a lot, but it’s nowhere close to budget outside of a few low-end singles. Even breaks, with skunk potential for the majority of spots assuming it’s a team break, are things to avoid unless you are into high risk gambling. A really nice product and a really painful price point.
2025 Topps Series 1
On Monday, Topps showed a hype video of the cover athlete, Aaron Judge, and what the box will look like. We can probably make assumptions about what the cards look like from the box, but it’s best to wait until we get the card images from Topps. I’m guessing we’ll see that by next week. In addition, the release date for Series 1 is being reported as Wednesday, February 12th.
2024 Panini Prizm Baseball Complete Set Premium Stock Dutch Auction
2024 Panini Prizm Baseball is getting a Complete Set configuration set on Premium Stock. It’s a 300 card base set getting the Premium Stock treatment - no images are available of what that will look like, but in other sports for Panini where they’ve done it, it ranges from a simple foil look to a mojo-style parallel look to a velocity-style parallel look. The base set is all numbered to 199, which should mean that there are only 199 Complete Sets available for purchase. In addition, it will come with 6 bonus cards that are gold parallels numbered out of 4. The Dutch Auction format will start with a ceiling of $750 and a floor of $200 on Tuesday, January 7th at 11 AM EST.
I don’t recall seeing a Prizm Complete Set, at least not in the recent past. If it has happened, it completely slipped under my radar. At the floor of $200, I’d think it’s not a terrible price, but it’s still not one I would pay. At half that price, it’s an easy buy. Halfway in between those two prices, at $150, is one I’d still pay, but that is about as much risk I would consider taking. It really is about the Gold parallels hitting one of the bigger names in the set, especially Paul Skenes. If you don’t hit any of the big name rookies/prospects in gold, I think it would be a challenge to break the set and re-sell everything and make back more than $200. I think you could get there, but after selling fees and taxes, it’s more effort than the small profit you could potentially make in my opinion. Obviously, I could easily be wrong here, but I’d rather not find out the hard way.