2015 topps baseball | Bad Wax Customs

First one was with Adam from Sports Cards Uncensored . We discussed the impending Upper Deck sale. The crux of the discussion was is the company worth it. His argument was with the NHL license, plus all the athlete licenses, it’s a damn good investment. At $40 million, it’s expensive for what you get. Panini is the obvious suitor. However at 40 mil, maybe not yet. At some point Upper Deck is going to have to let go of it and probably at a major discount. My feelings are that the value is in the brand name and not necessarily the licences. I threw the idea out there that maybe an athlete or a consortium of athletes would be a novel idea to own it. It would be as if the company would come full circle as one of the original founders was baseball player Dewayne Buice. Imagine the possibilities with the connections athletes have. Just thinking it would be interesting.

Next up was a question I posed to everyone. What will 2015 Topps design be known as? I mean think about 1987 Topps (wood set), 1971 (black box set), and 1978 (script set). After seeing this promo I kept thinking it has a texture like stucco. Then after looking at most of the subsets, I noticed it does look like stucco, like colored stucco. As I said yesterday, I love the design so it works. I think this might go down as one of the iconic designs. It’s just so different from all of the releases of late. Twenty years from now when Topps does it’s yearly Heritage set, its going to do a full set in this design and we are going to eat it up (as long as we are still alive and given Topps having a baseball license, oh and let’s hope Topps is still around). Damn that’s a lot of what ifs. Fingers crossed on this one.

Next up I wanted to get people’s opinions on whether or not the addition of autographs into card sets ruined the idea of a base set or for that matter non-hit card collecting in general. My point was that prior to the arrival of the autographed card, the chase was the rookie card. How many of us out there had amassed huge collections of key rookie cards? I’d even throw in the idea of graded superstar cards as well. Finally if you weren’t collecting key cards, you were base set building. All that is gone. Go ahead and open a box, 90% of us out there, sort out the subset cards and the hits (relic / autograph cards). The rest go into a huge box to sort later. How many of us still set build? I fully admit it, I do it. I didn’t used to but it’s all I buy a box for now. I’ll even admit that I use the base set to make my custom cards. Autographs are the single biggest reason cards cost what they do. The licenses are expensive but nothing compared to paying athlete’s to sign stickers. Saying that no one would buy the cards if there were no “hits” is not true, just look at Magic the Gathering cards, which still sell like mad and there are no “auto gamers” in those cards. Just my two cents.

Finally a funny idea. This one was brought up between me and Chris Harris from Stale Gum. Chris may not post like he used to but he’s a blast to follow on twitter. One of his favorite concepts with regards to packs is added value and I proposed that instead of a Rip card, you have a Bip Card, that when ripped, there would be a Bip card inside (possibly signed). Chris took it one step further and said that the Bip card could be ripped and a miniature Bip Card could be had that had eleventy-billion parallels. At which point I passed out from the sheer enormity of it all. Maybe that’s a custom card I can make in the future….