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 is one release expected with 2023 Topps Five Star.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Five Star
The mid-tier product is scheduled for release on Wednesday, February 21st.
There is a single Hobby configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with two guaranteed autos typically. Cut autos or booklets are the exception and will lead to just a single card in the box. Currently Blowout is selling boxes for $229.95 and cases (8 boxes per case) for $1,799.95. Last year Topps sold boxes for $230 and cases for $1,748. ***Update - the product went live on Topps’ website as expected. Boxes are being sold for $219.99 with a customer limit of 4. Cases are being sold for $1,699.99 with a customer limit of 2.
The design is very gold-heavy and the obvious star theme is found throughout. Last year there was more of a black/grey theme, and in years before it was more of white dominated scheme, but the gold and stars have always been there. This year they are leaning into the gold a lot more. All cards should be on card with the exceptions of the cuts - without a checklist though, there could always be something that leads to a sticker auto scenario. The relics are often really nice in this product, but I don’t anticipate the change from the past of the majority if not all of the relics being “not from any specific game, event, or season”. They don’t even go to the “player-used” scenario - it literally can be pulled from any jersey straight off the assembly line.
The checklist is not yet released, but it’s likely to be the typical mid-tier product scenario. A long checklist full of chases for rookies, vets, and ex-MLB players, but also including a ton of filler autos. On the marketing material we get Aaron Judge, Gunnar Henderson, Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodriguez, Michael Harris II, and Mark McGwire. Note that this is a 2023 product - even though we now have our first 2024 baseball card product on the streets, we still have 2023 products on the release calendar. That means the rookies here are the 2023 rookie chases - Corbin Carroll, Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Michael Harris II, Jordan Walker, Anthony Volpe, etc. ***Update - The checklist has been released and there isn’t anything unexpected in it other than that there are zero Tampa Bay Rays in it, which always sucks when a team is completely missing from a product. But also, the main player from this team they’ve used throughout the 2023 product SHOULDN’T be in any product any more, so I am guessing he was in it originally and pulled completely after the fact. Likely Topps didn’t have time to add in a new player from the Rays.
Five Star is something I rarely partake in. Ripping personal boxes have the odds stacked against you pretty significantly. Getting in breaks again have the odds against you given the two cards per box. So in a case break, there will typically be 16 cards. With 30 teams, at the very least you have 14 teams getting skunked, and that’s if there’s an even distribution of teams pulled from the boxes, which is rarely if ever the case. After a few weeks of initial hype, the singles market calms down and the card prices go significantly down as well. And that’s about the only time I would pick up cards for my PC. But in general, it’s a product that is an easy avoid and not really sure why Topps feels like this one should continue to be part of the product suite while it cuts other, more popular products.
2024 Topps Now Design
Topps released what the 2024 Topps Now design will be and also announced the annual Topps Now Road to Opening Day will be coming in March. The design looks very similar to 2023, so it was more of a blip on the radar than anything else.