Topps Finest Football has been offered to collectors every year without interruption since 1994. It first appeared as a small set in 1992, and skipped the ’93 season even though the brand name was used on card sets for the other major team sports. Regardless of the missed year, the venerable brand is easily one of the longest running football card sets produced outside of the Topps regular base set. The product is due to arrive on Wednesday.
The 2014 Topps Finest Football offering continues to offer its fans the Chromium card stock, rookie autographs and refractors they have come to expect. Plus, the company hopes to inject some buzz among the buyers with a few new twists, including cards with a fantasy football focus and Quarterback Quartet Autograph Patch Book cards.
Images released by Topps recently show sticker autographs.
Much of the familar configuration of the product remains the same. As in recent years and similar to what the brand does in other sports, 2014 Topps Finest Football boxes will arrive in the form of two six-pack mini boxes in every master box. Each pack of will contain five cards. Between those mini-boxes Topps is promising that each master box will contain a Rookie Refractor Autograph Patch Card and an Autographed Jumbo Relic. And, again as what has become the norm for the product, the base set has 150 cards which will be divided among 100 veteran players and 50 rookies.
Of course, as the brand has defined itself through the past two decades, it has done so in various hues of refractor cards. That, also, remains a constant with Finest as refractor parallels will come in several shades and styles. In addition to the basic Refractors, there will be X-Fractors, Pulsar (a new refractor style #/25), BCA and STS (#/10), Printing Plates and Superfractors (1/1). And the color refractor rainbow will consist of Blue (#/99), Gold (#/75), Red (#/50), and Salute to Service Camo (#/10).
Those same refractor parallels will be mirrored in the Rookie Refractor Autograph Patch Cards. Making the scarcer cards, that is, lower numbered cards even more desirable in this subset will be the fact that cards numbered to 25 and less will come with jumbo swatches. These rookie cards
The other “big hit” promised in each master box is the Autographed Jumbo Relics. These cards will be made up by both rookies and veterans. The parallel levels and quantities are the same as the base cards noted above, but rather that going to jumbo swatches on the lower numbered cards, a patch piece will replace the basic jersey relic in the parallels numbered to 25 and lower.
Collectors will find other autographed cards in the set as well, including Mystery Rookie Autograph Redemptions whose subjects won’t be revealed until after the season starts. But as we mentioned earlier, there are some new twists in this product. Although Dual Autograph Dual Relic (#/10) and Triple Autograph Triple Relic (#/10) cards have been around before in Finest, this year Topps is creating Quarterback Quartet Autograph Patch Book Cards with a Refractor design and signatures from four QBs. Those four-player booklet cards will be numbered to 5, and each one of these will also have one-of-one Superfractor parallels.
Another twist in the set is similar to what Topps is providing in its standard football set, that is, football cards revolving around the fantasy football world. Cards with a fantasy football focus are set to be one of the inserts in 2014 Topps Finest Football. Each master box is set to provide 2 Fantasy’s Finest cards. These will have refractor parallel versions as well as Pulsar refractors and 1/1 SuperFractor parallels. (#/99). In addition to being a chase card, the content of these inserts will consider the NFL’s top players from a fantasy football angle.
Select veterans and rookies will also have Fantasy Finest Autographed Jumbo Patch cards, which will also have Pulsar (#/10) and Superfractor (1/1) parallels. Fantasy’s Finest Autographed Jumbo Patch cards will show fantasy statistics with an autograph and a jumbo patch. Other inserts will include the Atomic Refractor Rookies which will also fall one per mini box. These have a die-cut design and three levels of Refractor parallels that will be found autographed: Red (#/25), Pulsar (#/10) and Superfractor (1/1). And a one-per-case card titled Finest QB Cuts will also debut in this product. It is also a die-cut design that will feature all rookie quarterbacks on refractor technology.
You can see Finest on eBay here.
2014 Topps Finest Football Checklist
