As spring turns to summer, a pair of new baseball card products will arrive, but they aren’t the only new releases collectors will have a chance to open over the next couple of weeks.
Courtesy of Maine Sports Cards, here’s a look at some of what’s ahead.
2018 Topps Finest Baseball (6/6)
Finest ‘master boxes’ have 12 packs with five cards per pack. Each two- pack box will have two on-card autographs on Chrome stock. Look for more low-numbered parallels in this year’s edition of Finest.
There are two new insert sets including Sitting Red, which is focused on home run hitters. There’s a ten-card Finest Careers die-cut set honoring the career of Cal Ripken Jr.
Boxes are sitting at $130-$140 right now. You can get a full preview here. Maine Sports Cards will be breaking boxes of Finest starting on release day.
2017-18 Upper Deck Premier Hockey (6/6)
A higher end product, Premier is known for Acetate Rookie Auto Patches and there will be one in each seven-card tin. All will be numbered to 199 or 299 and include some of the season’s top rookies.
There will be four additional autograph and/or relic hits and two base cards in each box at a cost of around $275 per box.
Among the new elements: Mega Goalie Pads featuring a jumbo swatch of premium leather goalie pad and #’d to 10; Premier Dual Signature Booklets featuring two jumbo signatures from current and former players and Legendary Sticks which feature jumbo game used stick relics from some Hall of Famers.
Interesting random hit possibility: the tin/box itself might contain a Wayne Gretzky autograph.
2018 Panini Luminance Football (6/8)
As we showed you earlier this spring, Luminance is a new pre-season product on Panini’s NFL calendar. Each box has four packs with ten cards in each pack. There will be three autographed cards and one memorabilia card per box at a cost that’s currently around $125. Maine Sports Cards is breaking boxes of Luminance.
The cards will carry a matte-style finish and appear to be borderless with action photography a constant. Rookies appear in their college uniforms.
Among the hits: On-card Draft Day Signatures from this year’s top prospects, which can be found in every other box on average. Rookie Ink will use black & white photography and according to Panini, “puts the emphasis on the autograph itself.”
2018 Topps Series 2 Baseball (6/13)
The wait is almost over for those throwback collectors who can’t wait to finish their basic Topps set for the year by opening wax packs. There will again be an Update set but many are content with the same cards that are in the factory set.
Series 2 will be distributed in hobby and jumbo configurations with the latter costing more but having more cards and more hits. Each hobby box will have either an autograph or memorabilia card inside.
Many of the insert sets will be extensions of what we saw in Series One but there’s a new 50-card Instant Impact insert, which highlights the breakthrough seasons of baseball’s newest stars while Longball Legends will recognize the game’s greatest sluggers.
2018 Panini National Treasures Soccer (6/22)
Panini brings its popular National Treasures line to soccer for the first time. Like its brothers in other sports, it’s a higher end product with eight hits per one-pack box ($500+ according to current online pricing) including at least four autographs and perhaps more.
Dual Jersey Autograph Booklet cards are among the biggies here, falling one per case on average.
Look for oversized memorabilia swatches in Colossal Materials, Tremendous Treasures, and the all 1-of-1 Brand Logos. More than 15 soccer standouts will have their first on-card autographs in this product.
Maine Sports Cards offers daily breaks of current and past products you can watch online. You can learn more about how to get involved in their box and case breaks and even sell your cards through their website by clicking here.
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