Helping to keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and
what might be worthy of your time in the Baseball Card Hobby for the current week. Check out our Discord for more discussion on this and any other hobby chatter Prospects Live Discord. This week we have two scheduled releases - 2022 Topps Complete Set Baseball and 2022 Topps International Trading Card Day packs. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur
throughout the week.
2022 Topps Complete Set Baseball
2022 Topps Complete Set Baseball hobby format is scheduled for release on Wednesday, August 3rd - retail formats will likely start showing up throughout the next weeks and months.
There is a single Hobby format, and multiple retail formats of the Complete Set product each with their own exclusivity. There is also a 582 Montgomery Club exclusive set as well which will have all cards stamped with the 582 logo. The Hobby format can currently be found for $60 pre-sale and contains an exclusive pack of 5 foilboard parallel cards. If you hit any of
the rookie chases in the foilboard exclusive, they will typically go for big money. The retail blue box format comes with an exclusive 5 rookie image variations and was sold direct from Topps for $50 last year. Various other formats are expected with exclusives. Last year there was a rare employee edition complete set that was stamped with an Employee Edition logo. An All-Star edition complete set with foil stamped All-Star edition logo. Chrome rookie boxes (typically one chrome rookie per box),
Chrome rookie relic/auto relic boxes, and retail foilboard (higher number version of the foilboards) with potential full set parallels have all been seen in previous years and likely will be coming this year as well. ***Update - Topps is selling the Hobby format direct from their website for $59.99.
The design is the base flagship 2022 design, so nothing really new to discuss here. As mentioned above, version stamping and foilboard parallels are the two main
elements that add to the design outside of the standard setup. On the back of the card, where we normally would see Series 1 (cards 1 - 330) or Series 2 (cards 331 - 660) we will see “Complete Set” instead.
The checklist is the full Series 1 and Series 2 base set. However, in the Hobby version, you have an opportunity to hit the 3 Rookie short prints which would replace cards 658, 659, and 660. These are of course, Spencer Torkelson (658), Julio Rodriguez (659), and Bobby Witt Jr. (660). I would also suspect that the Julio Rodriguez version is going to be very popular, perhaps equaling the Series 2 SP, as it is vertical instead of horizontal. For the Rookie Image Variations exclusive to retail formats (base, chrome, chrome relic/auto-relic), it will be Jarren Duran, Wander Franco, Brandon Marsh, Shane Baz, and Oneil Cruz. A very nice selection here.
I prefer to avoid buying these off the shelf since I am not really a flagship set
collector. My approach has always been to buy the singles for my PC in the secondary market and I don’t see that changing for myself. These will still be popular with the set collectors or those simply want to hunt the hobby rookie SP’s or pick up the image variations at retail cost.
2022 Topps International Trading Card Day
New this year we get 2022 Topps International Trading Card Day (ITCD) which is scheduled for Saturday, August 6th.
This appears to be a replacement for National Baseball Card Day which was wholly focused on Baseball cards. Now you have an
option of three properties - baseball, UEFA Champions League (Soccer/Fútbol), or Garbage Pail Kids (GPK). You get to pick a free pack, or perhaps are given a pack depending on the LCS where you go, starting on August 6th. With a qualifying purchase of Topps products, which appears to be $10 or more, you get an “incentive card”. In the first week, that will be Shohei Ohtani, and in the second week, starting on August 13th, that will be a Wander Franco rookie card.
The design for Baseball and GPK is essentially the same with rectangular blocks of color behind the player/character while the UEFA design looks identical to Topps’ UEFA products currently. Each product will include an ITCD logo on it. I am not really a fan of the Baseball/GPK design unfortunately.
The checklist on the baseball side has 30 base cards and 18 very low odds autographed cards. The rookies included in the base set are Spencer Torkelson, Bobby Witt Jr., Oneil Cruz, Julio Rodriguez, CJ
Abrams, and Vidal Brujan. In the auto checklist, you will find plenty more rookies, pretty much two thirds of the group of 18 including Wander Franco, Bobby Witt Jr., Spencer Torkelson, and Julio Rodriguez. Also have to mention Bryson Stott autos in the checklist for my Phillies guys Matt B and Good as Gold.
For the list of participating Local Card Shops taking part, see here. With the lack of
parallels, the base cards tend not to hold a ton of value and only the really hard to hit autos garner much return. As such, I tend to just pick up my PC cards in the secondary market after the first to market and FOMO dies down.