Thursday, February 4, 2016

Ready or not 2016 Topps - First Card

I'm not sure I'm ready for 2016 baseball cards yet but here they come anyway.

I bought a blaster box which has some kind of metal medallion card and a 72-card rack box which has a Target exclusive "Amazing Milestone Card". I suppose I'm going to have to get one of these rack boxes at Walmart.

Here's the first card out of the first pack.


Card front: The big news, of course, is that Topps has chosen to go full-bleed (or I think I read "partial" full bleed) on their flagship set. I'm in two minds on this. For one thing, there is a place for cards with borders (and that place has been Topps for 64 years) and there's a place for borderless cards (and it's called Stadium Club). On the other hand, I've always been a sucker for full bleed cards.

I don't care much for the big slash with the team logo hidden in it. It's too noisy. The player name block is fine, even if it is filled with fog. The team name is a little small, maybe to compensate for the logo being so large.

I'm pretty sure I don't like the how photo fades into fog at the upper left and lower right corners. It's hard to see on this card but I peeked at some others from the pack and it looks like the entire background is blurred. That's pretty common for Topps of any year, so no point in complaining about it now.

The card back: Topps has not significantly changed their card backs since 2007 when they pretty much dropped a decent sized photo on the back (except for 2010). The logo slash thing works better on the back. The team name is hard to read but the logo makes up for that. The card number is printed in a light gray which may be hard to read depending on the background color. The fog in the top part works better than on the back.

Overall impression. I liked 2015 Topps quite a lot. It was a daring change from previous years. I guess 2016 Topps is also a daring change from previous years but I don't like it as much as last year's set.

1 comment:

Tony L. said...

At first glance, I liked 2015. After a year of them, I'm more "meh" on that design. This design, though...ugh. I am not a fan. I guess I like cleaner cards and, more to the point, cards that don't make the player look like some sort of superhero or something. These try to hard to do that, I think.

Great analysis.