I love reading when hobby shops have success with new products. It’s still the grass roots of the hobby and what happens at stores is usually indicative of what’s happening in the market overall and that’s why it was fun to read the latest What’s Hot in the Shop and see Mike’s customers 
were enjoying 2014 Topps Museum.
Topps has really made an effort to improve the player quality on their checklists this year after some mediocre reviews the past couple of years. At the end of the day, though, the majority of collectors still have to feel like they got their money’s worth. I was really intrigued, then, when it was time to dig in.
This year’s Museum Baseball design has the white bordered cards surrounding the player’s photo with his name and team logo on the bottom. Each mini box contains five cards and the master box has four mini-boxes. Each mini box promises one on-card autograph, one autograph relic, one quad relic and one jumbo relic.
The Canvas Collection inserts return with both original and reprinted art cards of some big names, done on canvas stock.
My local card store (Triple Cards in Plano TX) did sell out of his order at $50 per mini box and $190 for a master box. He did mention one of his customers purchased 10 of those master boxes and felt that he had only received about $400 in retail value for his nearly $2,000 investment. 
Meanwhile leading on-line retailers are currently between $175-180.
It’s still a fairly major investment when you’re paying $175-200 for 20 cards.
Here’s what we pulled:
Base Cards: 13 of 100. That means you need at least eight master boxes to complete a base set. I know most collectors don’t chase the base set but that shows just how difficult even the base cards can be to acquire.
Green Parallel (#d to 199): Tony Cingrani
Blue Parallel (#d to 99): Yadier Molina
Canvas Collection: Ozzie Smith (not the original art)
Momentous Material Jumbo Relic (#d to 50); A,J. Ellis
Primary Pieces Four Player Quad: Michael Bourn/Carlos Santana/Jason Kipnis/Nick Swisher
Signature Swatches Dual Relic Autograph (#d to 299):Jedd Gyorko
Framed Museum Collection Autograph Gold (#d to 15): Kris Medlen
Well. we did get one of the best possible insert hits with the Framed Museum Autograph Gold but we might have also gotten the worst possible player to pull from the set at the same time. At least it was numbered to only 15. It seems that at this price level, another star hit would have been fair.
Museum has a nice design and if you’re a pack gambler, it’s not the worst product to break because there are a lot of great potential autograph hits among current players and Hall of Famers but I would hope your results would be better than mine.
Click here to see to see what’s been listed on eBay.
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