Last year, Topps did a yearlong thing mixing art and baseball cards called Project 2020. The concept was that 20 artists from across the art/fashion/culture spectrum would be assigned 20 classic cards from the Topps catalog, and each artist would put their own artistic spin on reimagining those cards, and the resulting 400 pieces of… Read More Topps Project 70: Déjà vu, but better
When I was a young sports card collector, I didn’t really “get” the whole Donruss Diamond Kings thing. Diamond Kings was an insert in the Donruss baseball card sets with hand-drawn/painted images of some of the day’s most popular players. I always thought the drawings/paintings looked kinda lame, and the design of the cards was… Read More SportKings, Topps Gallery, and Panini Diamond Kings: Sports cards as art
I haven’t followed baseball all that closely the last several years, but for me there’s nothing quite like the time when the first baseball card sets of a season hit store shelves. There’s an excitement and a freshness that comes with a new baseball season that seems to exceed the excitement and freshness of all… Read More 2021 Topps baseball series 1: A base set to beat all base sets
The weirdest thing to me about the modern sports card collecting industry, after having awakened from a 25-year slumber of sorts, is finding that an Italian sticker company previously unknown to the vast majority of American collectors had snuck in and taken over the hobby. I remember reading that Panini (like the sandwich?) had signed… Read More I hate/love Panini: A two-sided essay on the current king of sports cards
I wasn’t a pro wrestling fan as a little kid, but at some point in 1997 (I was 15ish), I was at my friend Casey’s house playing the newly released Nintendo 64 game WCW vs. nWo: World Tour. That was and is an absolutely amazing wrestling game to play with friends. We had so much… Read More Blast From the Packs: 2020 WWE Topps Finest
Topps is a pretty old company, but among its trading card manufacturing peers, it’s arguably the one with its finger most firmly on the pulse of the nation. Producing timely sets of cards for sports leagues, getting the first cards of rookie players in their new pro uniforms, or of traded players in their new… Read More Bernie mittens, #gamestonk, Topps and the zeitgeist
Around the time I started my journey of re-discovery in the world of sports cards in fall of 2020, I was talking to my best friend since childhood, Casey, about collecting. He’s been a lifelong collector of a lot of things: comic books, Magic: The Gathering cards, books, toys, video games, movies, and even sports… Read More The Legend of R.L. Stine’s Shirt: Opening a box of 2020 Topps Allen & Ginter
This is a post I’ve been sitting on for a while. How do I write a blog post about the grandpappy of all trading card companies? Topps has been around since 1938, with roots in an earlier tobacco company founded in 1890. It’s either purchased and absorbed (Bowman) or defeated (Fleer) its oldest rivals. Panini… Read More Blast From the Packs: Too much Topps
I started the Blast From the Packs series to talk about my experiences opening actual packs of cards and essentially reviewing the sets they come from, but over the past month or so, the majority of my “allowance money” has been going toward purchasing single cards — colloquially referred to as singles — on eBay… Read More The Singles Mixer: My favorite recent baseball purchases
Hockey was the last of the four major North American sports that I got into as a kid. I was probably about 12 or 13 when I started to follow the game, which means I was coming in about 1994, which just so happened to be the dawn of a bit of a golden era… Read More Oh Captain, My Captain: The 1984-85 Topps Steve Yzerman rookie
