Category Archives: topps sucks at high end

A Result Of Collective Stupidity

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One of the more awesome trends in the industry is that regular cards can have amazing patches. What this means is that you dont need to face astronomical retail type odds to get a team logo or something amazing in terms of a patch. This also means that products like Triple Threads, and other products that rely on contrived scarcity to bolster value, no longer can justify the fact that 1/1s are special in any way from the rest of the product. Right now, more than a giant handful of Topps 1/1 cards are either printing plates or paralleled cards that share nothing more than a different finish on the stock.

Of course, this has led to a major devaluing of the 1/1s, because they arent worth the chase anymore. I can get a Topps Sterling 1/1 and have it look WORSE than the card out of ten. Shouldn’t we just let the cards showcase what makes them special instead of forcing me to stomach a whole product’s worth of cards numbered to 3, even though its really something like 103?

A while ago I said that they should get rid of inserting the print plates into packs, as they are worthless, fugly pieces of scrap metal that are marketed as a chase for people who dont know any better. Im saying now that we should abolish the non-special 1/1s for all non-chrome products. If they want to put a logo on a card and number it 1/1, be my guest, but if they are just going to say the card is arbitrarily a 1/1 because of a different color on the card, a different die cut swatch, or even if there is NOTHING different, I wont support it.

Parallels are ridiculous in this hobby and I think that Topps high end and Donini mid and low end are the worst possible offenders. Donini parallels each SUBSET card at least fifteen times, you have the regular, numbered parallel, jersey parallel, second lower numbered parallel, auto parallel, etc, etc. That sucks, there is no reason to do this at all, other than accounting for laziness in filling the needs of a product.

Im now a supporter of letting the card’s features speak for themselves. If you get a great looking card with a ridiculous patch, it should be worth more because of that, not because its numbered to 7 or whatever. If you get an auto’ed version of a card rather than a regular one, that should be the reason that its worth more, not because its red rather than green.

Its become apparent that this hobby has thrived on greed and ego for many, many years. Someone needs to feel good that they have the ONLY ONE of that one card, someone has to know EXACTLY how many of a said card there are, they need to be the biggest shit out there. No longer are we focused on buying the cards we like or the cards that make us happy, we have to have the most of the rare, the most of the special, and we need parallels to tell us that we do. That is crap.

This fact has allowed the manufacturers to exploit our need to feel special by numbering things lower and lower, yet in reality just letting design quality slip so that the number on the card is the only thing we care about. Look at Upper Deck SP Authentic Baseball, there is so much confusion over the numbering on the letters, that people have literally freaked out. Upper Deck makes it worse by numbering each letter rather than the total number of autos to make the cards seem rarer, and we eat it up. Is your signed G numbered to 5 different than my signed G numbered to 25? NO! Its the same fucking card with lower numbering.

Ill give you this, the collective stupidity of the normal people in this hobby will prevent any semblance of a different hobby from ever surfacing. Collectors are generally so fucking stupid, that companies are even forced use numbering as a way to deter fakes. How absurd is that? People cannot survive in this industry without it BLATANTLY spelled out for them, no one is capable of thinking for themselves. This is why jersey cards have become so overdone, and why parallels are everywhere, because the idiots shit themselves with anticipation over whatever is the latest marketing ploy. It would be one thing if they were clever, but really these ploys are always mind numbingly stale.

It may be a problem in every industry, mainly because Americans are intrinsically stupid, but I get the aura of simpletons more from sports cards than from any other consumer group I follow.

Is There A Solution To The Jersey Card Problem?

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I have been talking about design a lot lately, mainly because of the sheer crap that is being churned out at record paces this year. However, this is not going to be one of those posts. An interesting thought crossed my mind, and it made me wonder if we should just do away with Jersey cards that don’t have autos on them. Keep it to patch cards and auto jersey cards, so that the staleness of the plain swatch cards starts to go away.

Here is the situation that led me to this, many of you are already clued in. When it comes to jersey cards, just the plain ones, they don’t sell for more than a buck or two, even if its Tom Brady or Albert Pujols. Most of the time they are just clumsily placed swatches on parallel cards that make my eyes burn, especially when done by Donini. Despite being practically worthless due to the numbers in which they are produced, these are still considered to be “hits” and count towards the normal allotment of the box. Personally, I am bored with these cards, and it seems as though the general buying public is too. Of course, that doesn’t stop Topps from releasing ass loads of “relics” from practice sessions and old timer games, slapping the name sterling or triple threads on it and trying to market it as a high end product.

What is the solution, especially if the companies continue to use the hits per box ratio as a way to draw in buyers? Well, UD has used the non-auto manupatch letters in the past, and that will continue with Icons this year. The letters go for about the same amount as the crap jerseys, so they thought it was a reasonable switch to sway from the monotony. I applaud the creativity, but the cards don’t live up to the status of THE solution to this overwhelming issue.

When you look back and see that 10 years ago, jersey cards were still going for $15-$20 each, you can tell that things have gone in the wrong direction when some don’t even get .10 these days. It used to be that getting a Jersey card meant you had a good box, now it means you have a bad one. I think that we need to address now that those plain swatches arent going to cut it anymore.

If this means that we get boxes with less guaranteed hits per box, I think that’s fine. Maybe guarantee one or two autos, and have the jerseys be an added bonus. Low number them, design them as stand alones, and make sure all of them are patches. I think that may be a start, see where it takes us.

The problem with implementing a solution in this respect is that you need to get all the companies to do it at once, which will never happen, especially in football with 3 competing companies. The minute that one company does away with plain swatch cards, the other will market that they are offering more for the money, no matter the fact that what they are doing is actually worse. Hell, Donini still thinks they have the most on card autos for the market, even though they are the sticker label capital of the industry. They even marketed a product with no redemptions, not mentioning the fact that BOTH competitors have on card autos as their offering.

Guys, its pretty simple. We have become complacent in our tastes. Companies continually exploit the fact that collectors are fucking sheep, and it grinds my gears to no end. I told UD yesterday that all you have to do is slap 38 “relics” onto a card and all of a sudden you have the product of the fucking year. That’s all it takes these days! Seriously! Design doesn’t matter, content doesn’t matter, all that matters is that people feel like they are moving away from the normal swatch card. What they don’t care about is that most of the products that try to do that, only accomplish it by piling more wood on the fire, not putting out the fire all together. That does not fly with me. The solution stays true to the idea “less is more” rather than “A FUCKLOAD MORE is more.”

One More Comment On Design and Keeping It Simple

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Lately, design has become my biggest pet peeve. This is mainly because of the fact that in lieu of actually putting out a set that features nicely thought out cards, manufacturers are instead just packing in all the swatches they can. Its gotten bad, really fucking bad. For example, we saw with Prestige and Prestige Chrome that Donini just recycled designs and added more busy design elements to draw our eyes away from the fact that the set was essentially the same as last year. The same thing has happened with a lot of different sets, mostly in previews for upcoming products like Absolute, LCM, and a few others.

In fact, I was just looking over the previews again for Bowman Sterling, and I couldn’t help but think ahead to how awful those designs will look on an actual card. Those lines criss-crossing all over the background is not going to help things, even though the player is much larger than on other products. See, it seems to me that elegant simplicity has been forgotten so that some amateur photoshopper can prove their chops in making grossly overstated cards with crazy lines and needless off-colored backgrounds.

The reason products like SPA have been so successful and widely supported by many card gurus is because cards like the patch autos never blast your eyes like you see in many other products. More proof: in LCM, Donini packs 4 separate swatches on some of the cards, as well as a sticker, all in addition to the crazy foilboard background you see. Why is this necessary?

Its time to set down the adobe stylus and let the photography speak for itself. No more disruptive crap on my cards, no more floating swatches, no more ridiculous color schemes, no more tiny player pictures. If you cant fit most of the player onto a card, you shouldn’t be releasing that design. We used to buy cards to see the players, not the 35 jersey pieces you can stuff onto a foldout card.

I will admit, that over the course of my design ranting, I have questioned if it is just my tastes that wretch at the complicated designs of recent Donini and Topps high end. Then I asked a few outsiders, who have never looked at cards before, and they could not believe that people liked some of the recent designs. One of the people I spoke with, a PR rep for a very prestigious car company, said that if he were running his car ads like the manufacturers were running their product designs, he would lose his job. He said that a few years ago, the good car companies started to shy away from packing shit into an ad, as well as overstating their designs. This helped out tremendously, and he was much more proud of the final product. The companies who didn’t follow suit have had many more problems generating revenue from their ads – moreso with the recession now. He confirmed that elegant simplicity is the way to go, and that I was not certifiable for saying the product designs looked awful. Lastly, he said the foilboard needs to be destroyed. I agree 100%.

I know translating the car industry to the sports card hobby isnt too great an analogy, but I do feel that there are way too many mistakes being made in terms of designing products. The bottom line is that we shouldn’t need to settle for crap, because that is no doubt what is being fed to us. They may say it is filet mignon, but its easy to see when dog food is on the plate. You can bet there will be many more rants coming down the pipeline, as there should be no shortage of fucking gross ideas as long as Donini keeps it up, and Topps takes no warning. I mean, we still havent seen anything on Triple Threads football, right?

Do They Really Think We Are THAT Stupid?

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Mario posted some more images from Triple Threads to “convince” us that this will be an amazing product. When I first gazed upon the “glory,” every single bone in my body lurched with a burning urge to barf through my eyes. Thanks to these wonderful new images, I am now convinced that this will be the worst product of 2009, that is, until Topps Sterling comes out.

Here is more proof of how ugly triple threads will be. Imagine this card on bright red rainbow foilboard, exactly the way it will come.

First, try to read what it says, second try to find out which player its for, third, try to find the player among the “relics” plastered across this card. Its really fucking scary to think that people love this shit as much as Donini loves Beckett.

Wait, you still arent convinced?

Okay, burn your eyes out with this:

What the fuck? Is this Topps Triple Threads of the Knights of the Round Table? Again, im not sure why people think that spelling out David Ortiz’s former last name in diecut shields is attractive. I know when I think about a cool card, I want a card featuring a shrunken picture of the player in order to stuff five die cut windows and a huge foil sticker onto the card. Oh, great, Im so glad they got a small banner in there with the player’s name on it.

I sincerely hope that none of you out there are going to be buying any of this.

The Ruth Effect

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As we saw today, when people see Babe Ruth, they go fucking banana sandwich. Ruth is the most valuable player there is in this hobby, and whenever given the chance, he will be exploited for that reason. See, when Ruth is on a card that contains any type of relic – even if it is not game used – the card’s value skyrockets. Obviously, Ruth cut sigs are the top of the mountain, despite being the least rare of many of that era’s players.

Combine a Ruth Sig, a Ruth Relic or two, with Lou Gherig’s stuff, and all of a sudden you have the approval of 95% of the hobby. The problem is that we should be voicing our opinions in opposition to horrid designs as well as cards that focus on stuffing the most possible crap into a card, that a second connected card is required.

When you talk about the Ruth effect, you also have to refer to collectors like some of the people who posted on the Triple Turds thread over on FCB. In addition to the few of us who told it like it is, there were just as many people who drool over the ugliest cards, as long as Ruth or someone similar graces the front. In fact, 08 Triple Turds cards were submitted as rebuttles to my onslaught against the product, ONLY because they had Ruth Relics in them. Fugly designs? Who fucking cares when you get six fucking bat relics that spell out “714 HRS,” right? No one seems to care that the blurb on the back says they are not necessarily from any season or game, they just care that they have as many relics as possible. Fuck, I cant even call them GU’s because of this. Topps has us referring to them as “relics” now.
Listen, I know I have put way too much coverage into the worst set so far this year, but sometimes you have to get rid of that vomit taste in your mouth. So dont fucking tell me that just because someone thought to combine Ruth and Gherig, I should sing the praises of the new “card of the year.” It doesnt work like that for me.
I dont care about anything if it looks like poop, and these cuts, embedded in blue fucking rainbow foilboard will look like a toilet after a chipotle challenge. The fact that its just some cut out paper that happens to be numbered 1/1 by the company who ruined the best cards you can pull, does NOT mean you should break the golden rule. That also means that just because Topps can find a way to cram 24 hard to read windows onto a card, does NOT give justifacation for you to break the rule if you subscribe to it.
Stop congratulating and praising shotty work, dont let the Ruth Effect overtake you. It sets a bad precedent for everyone.