Anyone changing their collecting plans when Topps is gone?
 

I'm mostly a vintage collector, but I get a Topps base set every year. I've got every set from 1951 to 2021

I'm really thinking when Topps ends that might be a good time to end that run.

Anyone else thinking of changing their efforts?

I am of the same opinion. When Topps is done, so am I. 69 Topps Baseball is were I started, I cannot go any further back than that without some stars and planets aligning.

So I am good to concentrate on getting my 72 set finished along with 73 and filling some 90s - 2021 and later sets as they come out. And be done when Topps is done.

Even if Topps gets bought, I’m done…..it just won’t be the same.

in my opinion, Topps products have been really hit or miss the last 10 years. A set like 2018 became a classic, but I thought 2021 flagship was terrible. There are so many products. Series 1, Series 2, Update, Chrome, Chrome Update, Chrome Black and that doesn't even get into things like Heritage, Hi Tek, Stadium Club, etc. I get that there needed to be more product as the hobby revived itself, but I think it ultimately just went the same way it did in the 90s. It feels like they spent less time trying to really make flagship important and more time on producing tons of different sets with rare autos and parallels.

I've always been much more into vintage, but I think I will probably just make my long term project now to collect full, or mostly full, sets from 1951-1980. There is no rush, it can be a lifelong project. Unless Fanatics buys Topps and continues to make a Topps branded product, I will have lost all interest in modern cards.

I would buy factory sets each year but stopped about 10 years ago. I'd rather spend time and money on vintage.

Still would buy a pack or two each year, maybe Heritage, just to see what they look like.

So, I am done with modern cards.

Mike

I also get a Topps base set every year and have sets from 1951 to 2021. I also have been buying the Heritage set every year since they came out. I guess I'll have to see what happens with Topps in the next few years before deciding what to do about continuing to buy the base set if there still is one.

I might go the other way. Im some 1952/53 cards away from having 1952-1990. I stopped in 90, and only have those later sets for nostalgia. I have long not been interested in modern although I did put a 2021 base set together from packs this year, not sure why. Seeing that there may be a clear ending soon, I may now go back and get all the sets 1991-2025 or whatever to complete the Topps run. Only base sets. I don't know, may be a waste of time as again, modern does not excite me at all. But I am still a collector.

the part of this that is unappealing to me is being able to just go buy a factory sealed set for less than $100. the thrill of putting together a vintage set is that you cant just go buy the whole thing cheaply. you can buy lots of late 50s/early 60s cards for $2-3 per card, but you'll get some ugly cards, which you then have to replace. slowly piecing together a set card by card, upgrading along the way, is the real fun in having complete sets, imo.

100% completely agree...and that reason is why I am continuing to do duplicate vintage sets...

I will admit though that I do love sorting a complete set, and putting them into a binder. Takes time, but satisfying. That's a lot of real estate though, 90 - 2025!

Yep that is the fun part.

Mike

I haven't picked up a modern Topps product in years; I think the most recent thing was about 4-5 years ago I picked up a couple of 1980s wax packs for the fun of ripping them. The last time I bought something brand new from them would've been 11-12 years ago. I don't plan to change my collecting habits; the shiny stuff just doesn't appeal to me. I'm not a big fan of the Heritage products either; I'd rather collect the originals.

It's a good bet Topps will end up licensing their name to Fanatics, its valuable in that sense for sports cards. They are owned by a private fund anyway right now. The connection to the old Topps and the Shorin's has been gone since Eisner and his other investors bought the company in 2007 anyway.

Personally, I collect players and not product, although I don't buy Panini. I'm getting into Jonathan India, he's got swagger. Topps base, Topps Chrome, A&G, Heritage, SGA, MiLB. I've got lots of options. Plus I collect as much memorabilia as I do cards. And if Fanatics does something interesting I'm all about that. I started buying Topps Now this year, and bought my first Project 2020 of Jarred Kelenic. Time will tell. I'm not doom and gloom about this, lots of potential upside if they don't botch it.

Some people brought up Fanatics might slab their own product, I wouldn't mind that.

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I too think Topps will live on via licensing to or acquisition by Fanatics.

I could not agree more. It won't effect me. Last "new" Topps I actually went out and bought was 1992/93 Stadium Club, and I traded all of them not long after for a Derek Jeter RC, which I still have, raw and ungraded. I have some junk wax given to me by one of my nephews, but they are packed away in a box somewhere in the closet. I have a binder of my favorite cards, and no complete sets other than 53 Bowman in it's own binder, newest cards in it are 1977 Topps, and a clear plastic box of various Topps duplicates. I traded away a bunch of my various dupes (I do still have one each of what I traded away) when building the 53 Bowman set, primarily 1960 and 61 Topps, and some 1957s and 58s.

Right now, I have Topps base master sets from 1969-1996 (used to have more in both directions, but needed some cash a few years back and sold some off). I am planning on going back (1968, etc.) and forth (1997, etc.) in coming years. The thought of Topps leaving the hobby, even if it stays alive in name if not in spirit, is depressing, but it does give me impetus to "fill in" the missing years. When they stopped doing football a number of years back I was still collecting that sport - I had Topps sets from 1970-2013, and though OK I'm going to fill out the run - then I lost interest in the NFL for a number of reasons, and sold all my Football, so that went by the boards. Won't lose interest in baseball, though. If the Topps name survives, I MIGHT be interested, but if the name goes away, I'm done with anything past 2025 for sure.

Question for those more plugged into the hobby than I am - I know Topps stopped doing Football, Basketball and Hockey over the last 15 years or so. Other than baseball cards, what do they print these days??

Topps has soccer rights for the big European leagues. And I think F1 too

Star Wars, tons of non-sports, etc too.

I won't be changing how I collect, because I collect vintage. But who knows - maybe Fanatics will do a good job. I mean, other card companies have come in and put out stuff comparable to Topps. Fanatics may not have any experience making cards, but I would have to imagine that they are serious about learning the business given they have the concessions to the big three.

The players are looking for a bigger cut. I would think they would be looking for innovative individuals who can deliver on that expectation.

Does anyone know how long the Fanstics contract runs?

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I have Topps Baseball sets from 1969 to present with the last 4-5 years as Factory sets. The one thing that will change with Topps leaving the business is I won't be buying UV cards and will get to focus more on filling the large gaps I have in 1960's Topps BB sets. With Topps last Football set in 2015 it gave me a nice goal of finishing a set run from 1955 to 2015. 3 more High Number 1972 cards and that run will be complete.

As much sadness as the headlines inspired, when I really consider what it means to me - I don't think this will be of huge impact. I have tried multiple times since getting back into the hobby in 2015, but I just can't get into modern. 95% of my hobby involvement right now is in the area of postwar vintage. I will admit to liking Topps Heritage, but if they don't make it all the way up to the 1980's with that run - it won't exactly be the end of the world for me.

In the interim, a lot can happen in 5 years. Fanatics might buy the name, and even if they don't, there are any number of things which conceivably happen that would mean the Topps name isn't completely dead. Any of that impacting my desire to collect modern cards one way or another just seems kind of doubtful to me right now.

While I hate that it's come to this for Topps, I don't think they are 100% innocent either in terms of how the game was played and things went down, and you have to remember too that this kind of thing is not unprecedented in the hobby. There has not been a Goudey or Bowman Gum Company for quite some time. Baseball will go on, and the hobby will go on as well.

Nah, except that I did enjoy the Topps Now products from the Dodgers title run. But my collection basically stops after 1981, which was the last year I was collecting as a kid.

If Topps is acquired by Fanatics I hope distribution is improved. The Topps site is horrible and they almost never have any products for sale on it. It seems like if hobby boxes do manage to make it to the site, they're up for an hour or two and then gone. Even when I've managed to win raffles to be included in the chance to purchase products in advance, the site is often buggy and I have a ton of problems trying to check out.

I suppose any hope for increased retail distribution is a thing of the past? In 1991 you could find cards for sale at a hell of a lot more places than you can in 2021. I get it, I'm just saying - I understand that most of the praise Fanatics gets for "distribution" is via online methods. That's kind of hard to get excited about, especially if they decide to basically shaft the LCS model.

The thing is, if you can get cards anywhere, no one will want them anymore.

It seems like virtually every product launch is spoken for before it even comes out. The wholesale focus of Topps sucks and it's even worse now that Topps factors secondhand market value into their initial launch. The last Sapphire boxes retailed for over $300 I think.

I'm so glad I grew up in the era of buying wax packs and cello packs, and didn't have to compete with adults fighting in parking lots over "product"!

Well, not exactly IMHO.

Plenty of people will want them, and I suspect they'd sell rather well IF the set were done right. You'd probably even see more growth in the hobby by drawing in more kids, who'd actually be able to find packs here and there.
This would assure more long term, generational interest in the hobby in the future.

What you wouldn't see is the clamoring, in-store childishness and all the "hot breaks" videos and buy-ins, along with almost instantaneous and ridiculous mark-ups for new product on the secondary market along with it's attendant impact on vintage pricing.

To me, that'd be win-win.

I would disagree with that as a blanket statement. The most popular time in hobby history was the late 80's and early 90's - when new packs of current product were available everywhere.

If you are one who buys into the hobby-only, super limited contrived scarcity thing - well then yeah. You might not want those cards.

There have been massive cultural changes since the junk wax heyday, most notably involving technology, the fragmentation of mass culture into countless consumption options, and what kids are into as a result of the first two.

Responding to this and the post above, color me skeptical that kids will ever again be into collecting pieces of cardboard with athlete photos on them simply for the sake of having them, at least on anything approaching a mass scale. That's not how 21st century kids relate to sports, or the broader world around them for that matter. I know this is not a unique view around here.

Also - even if cultivating a base of youth collectors were a viable strategy, when do corporations ever focus on long-term sustainable development over short-term windfalls these days?

My comments were made at the risk of being a bit too wistful for the past, for a moment - I suppose. I would agree with you that the hobby has passed kids as mass consumers by for long enough to where it would be difficult to ever get those kinds of numbers back.

If it remains purely or even mostly about the money (and I have no reason to believe it won't...) then any type of physical distribution strategy may not be of concern to Fanatics or anyone else. They are just going to maximize profit and move on to the next thing when whatever it is is no longer grandly profitable.

Me too and, sadly, I agree. Had our generation (boomers and those immediately after) been presented with the options kids have today, traditional cards would have died out before Donruss and Fleer came to market. We were lucky we managed come of age in a different era. For many reasons, some not having anything to do with cards.

Lucky for you, maybe. But aren't those people who grew up with wax packs the same people who now run these companies and have decided to shift the market to adult-only consumers?

Topps.com does suck. It's near impossible to get Topps Now autos and relics. They sell out in minutes. I don't buy boxes, but I suppose the same purchasers sweep in for those too. Although I like the way Topps sells T206 waves on their website.

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I don't think they're the ones "deciding" to shift the market. They're responding to structural changes.

Those changes are driven internally. No one asked for products that cost 300 or more per box.

Me personally, no. If you want to blame it on a generation I suppose you can but not sure what that solves.

I don't know if every problem needs a solution but they all have a start.

Topps is Done My post MLB Drops Topps After 70 Years, Trading Card SPAC Deal Terminated Topps Topps went down hill after 1985 some might disagree.

Correct, but there seem to be more than enough willing to buy them - a fact which will confound me to my dying day.

So a couple of predictions:

• The Topps name will live on, either bought out by Fanatics or licensed by them. It has value, but only if it is producing cards
• Fanatics will not produce cards for the demographic on Net54
• Fanatics will not produce cards for kids
• Fanatics will go in directions that Topps has started, but with vigor - severely limited releases, shiny stuff, NFTs, electonic cards, etc.
• We (Net 54ers) will clamor for the good ol days, but it is demand from collectors that forced the market to where it is today

But no day on the internet would be complete without bumping into the "my generation is so superior to younger one" ego-massaging posts somewhere ;)

I just found the news disappointing from a sentimental perspective. Even with all the industry changes since '81, I think most of us who grew up anytime from the '50s through the '80s (when it comes to baseball cards and especially all the nostalgia we feel from them) think "Topps".

So it's a bit sad how the name won't be part of the hobby now. Especially after 70 years.

Pretty much. The only thing I might quibble with is the use of the terms "demand" and "collectors". The hobby has created at least some of the demand themselves in the same way the tobacco industry creates "demand" for that next smoke or the gaming industry creates "demand" for that next spin of the wheel or roll of the dice. Like an earlier commenter said, few if any "collectors" were sitting there saying - "what this hobby needs are some hyper expensive offerings and an end to real distribution". Though I have strong personal feelings on this, I really don't mean it prejudicially when I say the people in the market for these $$ things and for the lottery mentality aren't collectors in any sense of the word as it's been used in this hobby. They're investors or, perhaps less kindly, if not more accurately, gamblers. A Venn Diagram would should show some overlap between them and the traditional collector base, but I'm not certain it's significant.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if, after Fanatics takes over and does whatever they're going to do, some company could get the rights to produce a single, comprehensive (say, 800 or so cards) with wide and varied distribution channels, a handful of inserts, a few autos, a few parallels, and a traditional, almost Topps Heritage-like quality - I think there'd be a HUGE market for it.

I have never been so glad to be a 'little fish'.






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I think you're Venn diagram comment is spot on. In earlier times, there was much more overlap between collectors (the majority) and investors/gamblers (the minority). But as $$ have flowed into the hobby, those two circles have separated and now the overlap is much smaller. And if the investors become disillusioned with their returns or distracted by some other shiny object, their money will flow out of the hobby, distressing prices. I think the modern market (and somewhat the high end vintage market) is the most prone to this occurrence. And it's not a matter of if, but rather when.

Topps?
 

I started collecting in 1962. I had completed sets from 1960 thru 1986 (Partials 1954-1959) I sold all my sets in 1986 to purchase my first house. I kept my Post Cereal and Jello cards and a few oddballs. (Goudey Wide Pens, Topps World Series cards, Butterfingers etc....) After I got settled I decided to build only Detroit Tiger team sets and finish my Post and Jello sets. So, I have been buying new cards and and rebuilt the Tiger team sets from the Fifties up. I tried to build a couple of Heritage sets but, all the SP's and everything... I gave up. I am now working on a 2012 Topps Gypsy Queen set (my 50th year of card collecting) I like the new cards but building a set is way to hard. So, I stick to Tiger Team sets including Heritage, A&G and Gypsy Queen. If the Topps brand stops or gets transferred I will probably quit because whoever ends up with it....well there would be huge changes given the current market. I would probably work on vintage Detroit Red Wing cards. (Sorry for the length of this)

I don't really have any interest in modern cards at this point, but if I were running Fanatics, this would be my strategy:

* Try to purchase both Topps and Panini
* Create one true flagship product for each of the 3 sports, print a lot of that product, but keep that product simple. It is called flagship for a reason, so it should be a true base set. Limit the insert sets to 1 per product, remove the autos and parallels from the flagship product, and make it an actual set again that people will want to build. A base set should be a base set, it should be buildable for everyone. There was no 1954 Topps Hank Aaron red parallel numbered to 5. That stuff should not be part of the yearly flagship product, imo.
* Create a number of other products in each sport that are filled with parallels, refractors, autos, patches/relics, and all the other hits that people are chasing, make them limited runs, and be clear about what the print runs are. Charge more for these "premium" products
* Create a new product for each of the 3 sports that is specifically targeted for kids. Print the everloving hell out of it, for as much demand as there is, and price it cheaply, like $20 for a hobby box. Give young kids something where they can buy a pack for $1 again and get cool cards. This set should not be aimed at adults, or flippers, or breakers. Target it toward kids.
* Sell everything direct to customer on the website, cutting out distributors and middle men. Allow LCS to still order product, but devise a better system than the one currently in place. They'd need to figure out a strategy to eliminate bots and the like, but product shouldn't only be available in the first 10 minutes of launch, and the bulk of it shouldn't be going to distributors and wholesalers. Fanatics does not need distributors, they have an infrastructure in place. Make acquiring product more fair and less about what connections you have.

We'd need to hash out some details and make a couple compromises, but if you and I were masters of the trading card universe, we'd be pretty much ready to go!

Market forces and consumer habits of a different century are a lot more to blame than the notion of those in power somehow making shifts only upon curmudgeonly, generational lines. Times change yes, and that is low hanging fruit I suppose - but I would disagree with the generational answer outside of a punchline.

The people buying now just look for “hits”. They are looking to make $ only. There are people who actually trash the base cards. These aren’t collectors coming into the hobby. They are gamblers looking to make money.


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