One night last week, I came home to several packages of baseball cards. Two of them featured either cards I received in trade or in auction winnings. The third package came from Topps and consisted of eight packs of 2013 Topps Chipz, a new product that’s designed to be used in a game.
Chipz is a product line that Topps has been using in Australia as part of its AFL issues for the last few years. In January, they announced it would be part of the company’s 2013 NFL line.
The Chipz feature a player’s photo on the front and his name, position and team information on the back.
We received only eight packs; however a full box consists of 36 packs and leading on line retailers are currently between $60-65 per box.
The base set includes 50 rookies and veterans with gold, sliver, magnetic and glow in the dark parallels.
There are low numbered autograph and relic chips so it’s not simply a gaming type of product but your odds of pulling one of those are pretty small. Autos are numbered to 25 and relics to 50.
Here’s what came out of our eight packs:
Base: We received 19. Jose Bautista, Michael Bourn (why on a product which I review in the middle of September is he still shown as an Atlanta Brave?); Jay Bruce, Billy Butler, Melky Cabrera, Yoenis Cespedes, Cole Hamels, Josh Hamilton, Adam Jones, Chipper Jones (with all the people commenting about our series of Archives articles with honoring players with final cards, I find this ironic that this late in the year I’m writing about a player who retired after the 2012 season). Clayton Kershaw, Buster Posey (2), Alex Rodriguez, Dan Uggla, Justin Upton (Still in a Diamondback Uniform) and Justin Verlander
Team Chipz: These are chipz which feature a team logo on one side and the player;s name on the other: Gio Gonzalez (2), Ian Kinsler, David Wright, Ben Zobrist
Team Logo Silver (These are the “glow in the dark parallels”): Adrian Beltre, Will Middlebrooks, Albert Pujols
Silver Parallels: Yu Darvish, David Freese, David Price
Gold Parallel: Pedro Alvarez
Magnetic: Neftali Perez
Now, if this was released early in the year, I could understand some of the off-season transactions not being reflected but when products come out with less than one month in the baseball season, it seems like you’d want players’ teams are as up to date as possible. I will say, that this release grew on me the more I understood what the concept was and as I understood more about the parallels. Is it being well received? It’s hard to say for sure. This type of product isn’t widely collected by adults but over 1,800 listings are on eBay so packs and boxes are being ripped. I think next year, with some minor adapting on Topps part, Chipz could become a nice long-range addition to their line and attract some younger collectors.
Rich Klein can be reached at [email protected]
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