Saturday, October 30, 2010

STOP IT TOPPS!!!

ATTENTION TOPPS: Why do you persist on making the "manufactured" patches? Why are you now making "manufactured" bat barrel cards? It's one thing to have the real thing in your hand. It's no fun when you pull a barrel card and it's a hunk of decorative DAMAGED art junk. Let it be the real thing or don't make it at all. It's worthless and just a filler like the thick white cardboard in a pack of cards or even sometimes the cards themselves!

2 comments:

Richard van Tol said...

I partly agree with you. On one hand I like the look of the patches and the bat pieces. On the other hand they were never worn so it brings you not closer to the game as they advertise with.

What me surprised was the text on a card with a piece of jersey on it was that the piece was worn by a player in a game. What A player in A game. I want the piece of jersey to be worn by the player whose name is on the card and the picture on the card must be from the game the jersey was worn. Is that so hard to do?

Todd Uncommon said...

It is a mixed bag. On the one hand, these manu patch (and now bat barrell) cards are pretty handsome cards in most cases. There clearly is a group of collectors that enjoy these, and I think that they have a particular appeal to set builders--an nice balance of difficulty, smallish set size, and desirable market value.

For those reasons, they are reasonably healthy additions, especially compared to franken-cut auto cards that just look horrible, contrived, and of dubious value except in the most extreme cases (e.g. George Washington) that makes you wonder what the context of the obviously scarce original, and now discarded, document was about. "Someone's family history? Who cares! Excise that valuable piece to make an ugly card, and wipe your rear end with the remainder!"

However, the downside of them manu-bilia cards is that they are indeed "collectibles" in the way that Star Trek souvenir plates are. They are not "memorabilia" or "relics" in that there's no real attachment to the original subject of any import.

If these cards were more obviously promoted as "replica" or "reproduction", then my shenanigans Geiger counter would stop ticking as much.