topps series 1 wrapper redemptions

Topps can be pretty quick about things on occasion. Case in point; I mailed out my Series 1 wrappers on Saturday, and received my four redemption packs today. According to Baseballcardpedia, you need to send the jumbo and regular packs separate. Not true. I stuffed all the wrappers into one envelope (10 jumbo, and three bundles of 36 regular hobby packs) and they accepted them. Here is what I got:

These were the best of the bunch. I got 20 cards total, with there being 60 in the set. I am going to hold on to these, they are really really nice and the scan doesn't even come close to doing them justice. As you can see, I managed to get one of the 34 autographed 1952 players, Ned Garver. He is numbered 27/60 and admittedly, I know nothing about him. I do have this though:

His 1954 Topps card.

A quick trip to Wikipedia lets me know that his rookie season was 1948 with the St. Louis Browns. He also played for the Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Athletics and was part of the first Los Angeles Angels team in 1961, his final year of play. Is he a Hall of Famer? No, but a fine player and a good addition to my collection.

warped!

Ok, so what's the deal with Topps? They have us send our wrappers to them, make us redeem codes online for cards, and they come back with these:

Yeah, the chrome legends and rookie variations are awesome. The Red Hot Rookies are great too. I went a little nuts and finished off both small sets for my "2010 Topps variations" binder. Also in that binder is my work-in-progress legends variation sets from series 1, 2 and Update (if you have any please let me know, I'll trade well for them). So these get here today, and coupled with the ones I received in the mail, I noticed something. NO WARPING! These cards are pretty flat, as they should be. Ok, they aren't perfectly flat, and there is a little curve to them but no more than Chrome has seen before 2010. Every year of Chrome I've seen so far has a little curl to it. This years Chrome and Bowman Chrome are inexcusably warped beyond storage. They still are too! Go out and buy a pack of Chrome and open it up, don't worry, I'll wait.
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See? Still warped! I can't believe Topps hasn't gotten this issue under control. I can't even stack these cards on my flat desk here without them falling over. It's absurd. How come all these redemption cards are normal but the packs aren't? I just don't get it. Don't get me started on the Chicle and Heritage chrome front/old cardboard stock backs. Those are terribly terribly warped. So warped they almost make a half-circle when you look at them laying on a table. Come on Topps!! Get with the program!

etopps

I forget exactly how I heard about eTopps, but when I did I decided to check it out. It's a set of exclusive cards released only online, with a weird sort of trading/buying element to it. I have no interest in selling on there, but they did offer up some Jays earlier in the year. Here they are (I apologize for the blurry scans, the cases make scanning difficult):

Jose Bautista 225/749.

Adeiny Hechavarria 450/749.

Seems that every card they release is limited to a certain number. In both these cards cases, they are limited to 749, or the most random number ever. I do have a third card in my 'portfolio', but it isn't ready for shipping because it takes roughly 7 years (ok, not really but it did take almost 4 or so months) to make these cards and have them available for shipping.

How it works is that you sign up for the newsletter on the website, they send you a weekly email with which cards will be available. If you see something you like, you buy into the 'pool' of cards and if you were lucky enough, they add it to your portfolio, which is basically your online collection. I say lucky enough because they limit each card to a certain amount and they take the first say, 749 people that signed up for that card but maybe 1000 people bought into it. I don't know, it's weird. All I know is that once I got the email with the Jays cards, I jumped on them. I figured they would be pretty cool. Once you have the card in your portfolio, you can buy it and have it sent to you (for pretty cheap actually) but only once the card is ready. Like I mentioned above, it takes a long time for them to become available for shipping. I think I bought these two in August, and they didn't get shipped to me until about two weeks ago. I know they do some football too and sometimes they will have autographed stuff as well. It's an interesting program and we'll see what 2011 brings. Anyone else do the eTopps thing? Or am I alone on this one...

it came from....the mailbox!

Look what decided to show up in the mailbox today:

Anyone recognize it? I'm sure some of you do. It had this inside of it:

What the heck could this be? What did I order from a no-name-on-the-envelope company, located in Duryea, PA??


Well, these are my Chrome wrapper redemption cards that I sent in about two weeks ago. Topps is on the ball here. I got my etopps cards really quick too but I'll show those another day. I've seen some nice cards pulled out of these thin sliver packs and I hope to get something kinda nice. Lets see what's inside, from top to bottom:

Mickey. What else is there to say about Mantle that Topps hasn't already shoved at us? I mean, a card for each home run he hit, a big set of cards chronicling his life, and endless variants, parallels and relics of warm-up jackets and such. Anyway the next card is much better:

The National League Rookie of the Year, sweet. Buster had a fantastic season, got his ring and the ROY award, this kid can only go up from here, definitely one to watch this coming season.

I've got to admit, I'm not a huge Mets fan but I like Ike. He had a pretty respectable season too and I may even make it to another Mets game this season, so hopefully I'll get to see him play.

The picks here are pretty good and I can't really complain. Even the Mantle has a place in my collection here. Whats odd is that the Posey and Mantle are both numbered past 220. Maybe these are an extension of the Chrome set? If so, I may have to get the rest, so if you have some for trade, let me know and I'll definitely trade big for them.

they're hot!

Has anyone else gotten their Red Hot Rookies yet? I got this one in the mail today, the first of five. I actually have another of this guy coming, sometime in the future when Topps decided to mail me the rest. I haven't checked eBay yet to see if there are people selling them, but I can only assume that there are. I guess they look pretty good. The Rookie Card logo is blackened on this one for some reason. I also have no idea why these take so long to get into our hands.

On another note, I mentioned that I was getting some graded cards in the mail and asked how to open them up. Thanks for the advice, and when they get here I'll try some methods and let everyone know how it turned out. I just checked and saw that they are 2 PSAs and 1 SGC. Hopefully they are easy to bust out.

The last thing is that I got a card in the mail today that I will post tomorrow. I have no words to describe it and it surely adds some fantastic quality to my budding collection. Feel free to speculate as to what it is. Check back tomorrow to see what I'm talking about!