2013 Topps Baseball - An Early Review

I am not the type of collector that trolls twitter, topps, or other card sites waiting for upcoming releases.  I was on one of my fellow bloggers page bdj610bbcblog (one of my favorite blog sites) when I found out that the images for the 2013 Topps have been released.  For a break down I suggest you goto bdj610bbcblog, they did a great job!

Here is the first card I am going to review, their base card of Bryce Harper. Overall I like it! I really  wonder how Topps in 2012 released their card images 5 month early and never once realized that they had a major error with the landscape stats in Series 1 with having doubles listed at 3B. NOBODY at Topps noticed this, but I noticed it the first pack I opened, and so did the rest of the hobby!

(Above is a 2012 Topps Series 1 rear view landscape 3B/3B error uncorrected)

 I feel instead of cramming an upcoming product at us almost 5 months before release they work out all the bugs and errors.  Nothing irritates me more with a product more than buying a product that has errors due to poor editing or quality control.  With that said, the image is free of clutter, name and logo are easily seen and not camaflaged in a photo like past Upper Deck Baseball Products.

As we expect with the basic Topps release that their autograph cards would be stickers, so I am not surprised.  I think it is funny that card companies show their greatest cards that will be released but to us average collectors, we wouldn't pull a Rizzo Autograph, but some pitcher who pitched 30 innings and had an era of over 5.00.  I do find these autograph cards to look better than their 2012 release.

1972 Topps Mini's...enough said!  My favorite all time set just happens to be 1972!  The past few years have seen Topps and Lineage have separate sets of their mini's unlike Allen & Ginter which use just a smaller version of the base card.  I loved the Kimball, 1975 Linage Minis, and the 1987 Minis releases.  I hope this is something that stays going!

I haven't seen any word about this yet, but a message to Topps: "STOP reprinting old cards!"  No more Cards Your Mom Threw Out, because why would my mother have thrown out a 2009 Jim Thome card?  The card companies have stuffed images of Ty Cobb on cards in dozens of sets per year.  Are there even that many real photos of Ty Cobb in real life, or are they computer generated?  I love Topps Fan Favorite sets because you have cards from players who were favorites and have been forgotten.  But I have four Topps cards in four different Topps releases that used the same image of Johnny Bench.  Stop the over killing of our past stars!

I love the die cut cards, it is something that isn't your everyday rectangle card.  This card I love, enough said!

You know all those game code cards we get, what do you do with them when you are done?  Do you throw them away, do you collect them?  How about this, having a separate 25 card code set that may look like the one below.

As a collector, would you rather have a couple dozen game cards that look like this above or do you like the type of cards they use now?

Let the debate begin, let your voice be heard!

Overall, I enjoy Topps products, they add a lot of variances, gold, silver inserts parallels, minis, autographs, relics, die cuts, etc.

Thanks for reading!