The View From Wisconsin

So I've hit the 400 total card mark with Topps Baseball Series One, and I've come to a few impressions on the set so far:

• It was about time that Topps decided to make their Topps Town codes part of "real" insert cards. As much fun as it may be to have an online "virtual" card collection, the code cards from last year had all the personality of a piece of cardboard.
  
• You can still put me down as "not a fan" of the series release concept. And you can also put me down as a "HUGE not a fan" of the variation release concept. I did get one of the "variation" cards of Cy Young, but I'd rather that these be labeled differently - or give them their own number in the set. I mean, honestly Topps: you never limited your previous releases to only 660 cards in the past, why do it now?
• The "Legends of the Game" subsets are the most confusing to me. There's actually three separate versions of these cards, delineated by their lettering only. It's not a good thing when you have three different Babe Ruth Legends of the Game cards and the only thing that is different about them is that one has "LG-7" (the main insert in all Topps packs), one has "LLG-3" (the ones in Wal-Mart packs) and one has "LLP-3" (the ones in Target/Dayton-Hudson packs).
• Biggest complaint of all: someone at Topps' graphic arts department does not get one basic concept about their target audience. I would have to believe that an overwhelming majority of the people who buy their cards are male. And, given that seven percent of the male population have color deficiency, the idea of putting black card numbers on red and blue backgrounds is incredibly stupid. Sorry if that comes off as "Get off my lawn!", but it's the truth - squinting as you're sorting cards is not fun.
  
• I do like how they made checklists out of the "Classic Combos"cards in the set. That answers the question that had been floating around in the last few years of Topps' baseball sets, whether or not those Checklist cards were actually part of the set or not. Of course, it would be more important if people actually tried to complete sets pack-by-pack instead of just waiting for the "factory" set in November.
  

Labels: Topps Baseball cards