TOPPS Heritage 2011 (Baseball): 8 Pack Break

I love baseball but do not collect baseball cards to the same volume as I do hockey cards. When I was a kid I collected nothing but baseball cards and for some reason that is not the case anymore. This week I picked up 8 packs of Topps Heritage 2011 Baseball cards. I did the same for the 2010 Heritage product and was fairly satisfied with the product and thought I'd do the same again this year -try out a few packs.

The 2011 Heritage product has a design that mimics the 1962 Topps card series. It is a nice looking set with faux wood borders and a staged, often portrait shot of a baseball player. The bottom right corner of the photos are slightly rolled so that the player's name and team name can be shown. The color and sharpness of the photos are also skewed so that they are reminiscent of older photographs. The skewing is nice because it makes an otherwise boring portrait shot instead dynamic and interesting. The back of the cards are also nice because they include a tasty paragraph of trivia on each player, their combined career stats, and a bit of trivia that is associated with a comic-style drawing of the player in action. Overall, this set is really nice looking and worth picking up!

Each pack contains 9 cards with the chance of subset, memorabilia, and autograph cards. From the base cards I picked up 5 rookies and two high-numbered cards. The high-numbered cards are base cards numbered between 461 and 500 (I believe), and they are short printed. High-numbered cards fall 1 in every 3 packs. In addition, I picked up one News Flash Backs and Baseball Flash Backs cards. I like the baseball flash backs as it highlights the major events of the year this product pays homage to, but the News cards can be weak. I picked up the 'Dodger Stadium opens its doors' card, which is fine, but I've seen some of these cards feature news stories about the Mona Lisa and American politicians. I'm sorry, but I'm buying baseball cards and not random stuff cards. These two cards represent part of the product's subset and are perhaps the weakest part of the product. They are not numbered nor do they stand out from the base cards. I think they could have just done without these. Next, I pulled a check list. There are six checklists in this series and they are not part of the base set. I prefer checklists to be part of the base sets and there is nothing interesting about this card other than the card stock and colors are different from the base set. I don't get this as a checklist should go with the base set cards, and why does this card stand out from the base cards more than the subset cards do? Weird.

Pulls from the 8 packs: 5 rookies, 2 chrome, and 2 relic /memorabilia cards.

OK, I saved the best for last here. From the eight packs I broke, I found two chrome and two memorabilia cards. The chrome cards are the same as the 2010 series, but still look really nice. The chrome cards are numbered out of 1962 (makes sense) and there are multiple versions of them with different numbering schemes. For instance, there are green chrome cards that are numbered out of 100 something and fall 1 per case. Next, I pulled two memorabilia cards or what Topps calls clubhouse relic cards. The first was of Justin Morneau (Twins), and the other was Albert Pujols (Cardinals). The relic cards look nice with clear portrait photos of the players and a decent sized jersey, although some relic cards also feature wood instead of jerseys.

I had heard that relic (and autos) fall one per box so obviously I had lady luck on my side with these eight packs. Even if I had pulled only one relic card in these eight packs I think I would've still been happy. The base set looks good and the chrome cards and relics add a nice additional value. There are two drawbacks to this product. One is that the subset cards don't make sense and blend in with the rest of the set. Second is that I don't like there being too many parallels to a product. From what I've gathered, there is the regular chrome, green chrome, blue chrome, black border, and red something or the other parallels. I think a product should stick to one or two parallel editions. Anymore than that and it waters down the value and interest of the parallels. That being said, I still love the look of the chrome cards.


This product is pickled.