Night Owl Cards

  Twelve years ago I wrote a post about the return of the Topps Future Star(s) label and my lack of appreciation for it when Topps first broke it out in the late 1980s (although it also used "Future Stars" to describe its three-player prospect cards at the start of the decade).   Since first returning in 2014 -- actually its second return as the Future Stars went on hiatus for 1992 and 1993 before coming back in 1994 -- the Future Star has continued strong for every Topps flagship set except for one. It's so much a standard part of the base set now that I don't think anyone even notices it anymore, at least certainly not like collectors did in the late 1980s.   There's a reason for that, I think, outside of showing up every year. I went through the last 12 years and broke down the Future Stars for each. The idea for this post began as a dissection of the Future Star(s) logo, but I found totaling Future Stars for each year more interesting.   Let's start with ...

I was surprised to see that I haven't written a post from this series in a year-and-a-half . That's long enough that I probably need to provide a refresher on the mission behind these posts.  The goal is to find the best card per team for sets that I have completed. I've been running this series since 2010. And as I update the series, I go farther and farther back in time -- the ultimate goal, to get to the 1956 Topps set, which is the oldest I have completed.   But whenever I complete a new set, I press the switch on the time machine that says "forward" and review whatever newer set I have completed.   Since I haven't done one of these in awhile, I've completed several sets that need Team MVP reviews. The farthest back I've gone is 1981 but there is so much more recent ground to cover. Heck, I've completed 2024 Topps and 2022 and, ick, 2021. And then there are mid-1980s sets that I've completed more recently, like 1985 and 1986 Fleer. It's...

Topps recently announced that it's looking for collectors to vote for their favorite Topps baseball design for each decade since the 1950s. There is a site where you can go to place your vote . Topps says that the winning designs for each decade will appear in packs of 2020 Topps Series 1. It doesn't go into detail about what that specifically means so I don't know if we're going to see regurgitated reprints of cards from the design, or cards with buyback stamps on them, or actual old cards from those designs (the much preferred option). This is all well-worn territory for both Topps and collectors who obsess about past designs like me. But since I like that stuff, I thought I'd go through each decade and make my selections and post them here for all to see. Also, I'll add some extra stuff like those people do when they're handicapping the Oscar winners and I read it all the time even though I have no idea what the movies are. My votes: 1950s ...

When you've been blogging as long as I have, collecting as long as I have, you come across milestones every year. For example, this year is the 45th anniversary of the first time I opened a pack of cards (1974 Topps). It's also the 10th anniversary of the first time I evaluated Topps flagship on this blog. That happened with the 2009 set. That means I have evaluated an entire decade of flagship. And therefore, I can rank the flagship sets from an entire span of 10 years -- 2010-19 -- which I will do for you now. The best part of this exercise is I can go back into the archives and find what I said when I was looking at the set for the first time ... because I've been doing this for 10 years. So, the rankings for Topps flagship from 2010-19: 10. 2016 This set will always be remembered as the first Topps flagship set without borders. That is not a point in its favor. However, I"m more disturbed by the way they went about the set. The "smoke" e...

It's all in the way you look at it. Like just about everything in life, a repack box can be praised or ridiculed. You can seek out the negative. It's very easy to do, particularly when Fairfield hides the less desirable packs so they are not viewable from the outside. So you could focus on the repack's weak points. It's bound to include a pack or two of some version of the lifeless, metalic-looking Prizm. Grown men in wordless laundry on a set that is from either 2012 or 2013. Who knows? And, yeah, you could emphasize that every repack seems to contain multiple packs of Panini Triple Play, including those useless puzzle pieces. You'll scare plenty of collectors away with that rant. Also, there are lots of packs of cards from sets that either I don't need or don't want, like 2015 and 2016 Topps flagship. The box is filled with collecting incidentals. But I find that after I'm all done opening the repack packs and sorting through what ...