Platinum Football 2014 Box Break and Review

2014 Topps Platinum Football arrived as a late-season mid-range product promising three rookie autographs per box including one auto rookie refractor patch. Boxes contain 20 packs with five cards per pack. You’ll also get one Platinum Die-Cut Rookie, one Black Refractor Rookie and five X-Fractor Rookie Parallels.

Topps did make some design changes on Platinum this year, giving it more of a high-end feel, although some of that Chrome-like technology starts and end with the rookie cards. The autograph checklist for Topps Platinum Football is a bit of an odd mix. One of my local shop owners did say customers who opened Platinum said how attractive the autograph patch cards were.

Platinum stands as a hybrid product–enough base cards to appeal to set collectors (although it’s a 150-card set so your team isn’t exactly well represented)–but enough for those who gravitate toward autographs and inserts.

Shops in my area were offering Platinum at around $100 per box, but as has been the case with so many products lately, online pricing has dropped to the $65-75 range. While there are a few exceptions, most of the releases in the previous month or so have tanked on release. And if you are a store owner, do you constantly want to lay out money out front only to find that you have to take a loss if you wish to get a return of capital? From the standpoint of a collector, this is a pretty decent product at that lower level.

Here’s what we pulled:

Base Cards: 73 of 150 or just a little less than half the set. This means you need two boxes and a few random cards to complete a base set

Blue $2014 Topps Platinum Peyton Manning Blue Wave Refractor$ Wave Refractors: (These seem to be about one per pack): Tavon Austin, Antonio Brown, Michael Crabtree, Justin Edelman, Zach Ertz, Joe Flacco, Nick Foles, Matt Forte, Josh Gordon, Rob Gronkowski, Desean Jackson, Julio Jones, Eddie Lacy, E.J. Manuel, Peyton Manning. Alfred Morris, Cam Newton, Adrian Peterson, Ndamukong Suh

Gold Refractors (#d to 50): Teddy Bridgewater

$2014 Topps Platinum Bridgewater gold refractor$ Rookie Die Cut: A.J. McCarron

Autograph Refractor: Jason Verrett

Autograph Gold Refractors (#d to 15): A.J. McCarron

Patch Autograph Refractors: Brandin Cooks

The Blue Wave Refractors are sharp. We can always continue to hope that McCarron develops into an NFL starting quarterback; however with his college pedigree, he will always be a popular player and getting an autographed of his numbered to 15 made for a very nice hit indeed. The Gold Bridgewater Refractor was nice as well. Cooks is one of the most promising players in this year’s wide receiver class although his “BC” sticker auto isn’t exactly a treasure.

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