My first 2013 card - some retail purchases in Denver

I was in Denver last week for work, and there happened to be a Target right across the street from the hotel I was staying at.  So on Tuesday night I stopped there and found….

2013 Topps available!  Here’s my first card of the year:

A very nice card of last year’s MVP candidate, Andrew McCutchen.  If the Pirates didn’t happen to be in the same division as my Reds, I’d probably root for them.  I like this design – it’s my favorite since I started collecting Topps again in 2010.

Here are the card backs.  The big to-do on the inter-webs has been the chase comment at the top.  I agree with most people’s sentiment – it’s kind of silly and detracts from an otherwise nice card back.  It’s a similar thing to do to 2011 when Topps told you a player who had the same card number in a previous Topps set – except that was a much better idea.  I scanned this Molina one (really large) because it has an error on it.  This is just a typo.  The 3,234 should actually be the second number – how far he is away (1,022 + 3,254 = 4,256).  No clue where the 3,727 in the middle comes from.

This card came from a retail “loosey”.  I bought one of those packs, one jumbo pack, and a hanger pack (hanger box?).  They didn’t have any blasters out.

Here’s some of the better base cards I found.  Or at least in the case of Raburn, one of the more interesting cards…

There were also quite a bit of retro uniforms – see below.  Though I’m not sure about the Indians uniform – I think that’s actually an alternate uniform.  It has a retro feel too it, though.

There’s a few different parallels – red border parallels are specific to Topps, the green emerald cards are replacing the golden moments and platinum diamond background parallels from 2012 and 2011.  And of course, there are Topps Gold cards numbered to 2013.  Night Owl – I’ve got these Dodgers set aside…

I got quite a few different inserts.  I learned the hard way there are three versions (at least I think it’s just 3) of the Chasing the History insert.  And I bought the right combination of packs to get all three versions.  There’s the “regular”, and then two types of holographic versions.  The holographic silver kind comes in the retail jumbo packs, the gold foil came in the hanger box, and the regular came in the regular retail pack.  At least that’s what I think.  I didn’t exactly track it that well because I didn’t know about this until after I opened the packs!

The Thome is the regular, the Berra is the silver foil and the Rivera is the gold foil.

Here’s some of the other inserts.  I like the look of the Calling Card insert, though the lines feel kind of cheesy.  The Cut to the Chase die-cut cards are really nice.  The “Chasing the Dream”?  Not so much.  Those just don’t do it for me whatsoever.  I do like the look and feel of the 1972 minis, but I don’t really get the point.  Why 1972 minis in 2013?  At least having 1987 last year made some kind of sense – the every 25 year thing.  Still, the cards are nice, and I particularly like the Posey.

The first time opening up the new year’s Topps cards is always exciting – I missed being away from home last week, but it was nice to get a little baseball card fix in Denver.  I really like the design this year – I think the cards are better in person than I thought they looked on the sell sheets.  The muted lines behind the team logo really augment the cards.  I bought a hobby box when I got back to Chicago – I’ll post results from that this week as well.

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