2012 Topps Platinum Football Preview

by Chris Harris

It’s another week, so it must be another 2012 Topps football sell-sheet.  The company is making no bones about its efforts to take advantage of this year’s highly anticipated rookie class.  This time the sneak peek is 2012 Topps Platinum Football.  The fourth edition of this hybrid product, which combines current NFL stars printed on foilboard with short-printed rookies on Chrome Refractor stock, will go live around Labor Day.

The base set will consist of 150 cards, 100 veterans and 50 Rookies.  Each five-card Hobby pack will consist of three veteran base cards, a Ruby parallel (which doubles as an anti-pack searching decoy) and a Chrome Refractor Rookie.  In addition, the usual multi-colored galaxy of low-numbered “colored” Refractors – similar to Finest and Topps/Bowman Chrome — will be available for each of the Chrome Refractor Rookies.  As with most 2012 NFL products Topps has previewed so far, the final checklist has yet to be released and will largely be dependent on the results of the 2012 NFL Draft – although, again, Topps is prominently spotlighting Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, Justin Blackmon, and Trent Richardson heavily on the provisional checklist and sell-sheets.

Each 20-pack Hobby box is expected to yield the following:

• One Black Refractor Rookie partial-parallel
• One Die-Cut Rookie insert
• Two Autographed Chrome Rookie Refractors
• One Autographed Chrome Refractor Patch

Like in Finest, the two-per-box Autographed Chrome Rookie Refractors are a pseudo-parallel of the 50-card base Chrome Rookies; however, unlike Finest, these cards will be signed on-card.  Seven different colors of Autographed Chrome Rookie Refractors can also be had in packs ranging from the one-of-one SuperFractor to the numbered-to-150 Black Refractors.

2012 Topps Platinum’s other main box hit, the one-per-box Autographed Chrome Refractor Patches, will still have sticker autographs, but each card will be serial-numbered to an as yet undetermined figure.  A minimum of 40 rookies and 15 veterans will be featured in this set, with all the usual low-numbered colored Refractors randomly seeded in packs.

Rounding out Platinum are another batch of multi-player, low-numbered, Rookie Autographs — some with and some without swatches of photo shot-worn jersey patch material – and Platinum Rookie Patches, which are seeded into packs at the “case hit” level.

Unlike Finest Football, 2012 Topps Platinum Football, will be released to both Hobby and retail outlets the week of September 3^rd.  Each Hobby box will contain 20 packs of five cards, and each pack should retail for around $5. Hobby cases will have 12 boxes.  See the gallery below for a mockup of the card design.

Platinum Football 2012 Checklist – HOBBY

Topps Platinum Football 2012 – HOBBY

Chris Harris writes the popular hobby blog, Stale Gum

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About Rich Mueller

Rich is the editor and founder of Sports Collectors Daily. A broadcaster and writer for more than 30 years and a collector for even longer than that, he's usually typing something somewhere. Type him back at [email protected]