Kicked in the jimmy twice by Topps this week!

This has been a pretty eventful week in regards to Topps products. Let me rewind to last Sunday. I had made my weekly journey to the card shop and decided that I wanted to jump on the Bowman bandwagon. There were a few hobby boxes remaining on the shelves (the jumbos had long since sold out) and these remaining hobby boxes were still priced reasonably, while the next shipment was guaranteed a bump of about 30% for hobby boxes and even higher for the jumbos. I decided to jump on one of these boxes and at the very least get an auto and fill out a couple of binder pages of chrome.

Now Chrome has never been my favorite. While the technology is pretty cool, the curl, scratches, roll marks and an amazing knack to pick up fingerprints makes these cards amazingly difficult to handle and store.

Unfortunately the box I received was worse off than standard issues. Practically every pack in the box sported cards with dented corners, scratch marks, rub marks, extreme curls, even some with actually dent scratches in several of the chromes, including my one blue-refractor chrome card. I did pull a Strasburg Chrome, but even it has some noticeable damage to the card surface. I pulled two autos (beat the odds) but one has some paper crease on the back side and a dented corner. Practically all of the cards have a rough cut side on them as well.

The regular cards are in reasonably better shape, but there are even some issues there with soft and dented corners. A poorly packed box of poorly manufactured cards.

Score: Topps 1 - JD's Wildcardz - 0

The second swift kick came just yesterday. Long-time followers of this blog have known that last year I teamed up with another blogger and together we cracked the 2009 Ginter Code. besides the difficult task of splitting up the set of autographs prize, Nick and I were asked to submit photos to Topps to have the honor of appearing in this year's set.

The first idea was to get a photo of Jacoby on a Topps card. Topps said no.

Uh-oh.

The second idea was the Nick and I would have our pictures morphed together Ginter-style and have a paragraph each on the back of the card. Topps decided that they were having too much difficulty finding a way to share the card.

Uh-oh.

So after a couple months of silence, I get a phone call from Nick. Turns out that Topps determined a solution to the problem...and that solution was to create a card with the picture of the person who submitted the winning entry for the contest. That person was not me :)

Score: Topps 2 - JDs Wildcardz - 0

uh-oh!

What does this all mean? I will NOT be appearing in this years Ginter set. There will be a champion card, and Nick will be represented on that card. There is still an off-chance that my paragraph (in which I got to mention that I am collecting for my son, Jacoby) MIGHT still appear, but I am struggling to see how that all fits together. Maybe people will assume that Nick is Jacoby's dad!

A big kudos goes out to Topps for complete disregard of the teamwork concept by continuing to ignore that fact that there were indeed TWO codebreakers this year.

Now please understand that this is not a slant on Nick at all. In fact, he kinda got caught in the middle of the whole mess and Topps went ahead with a design without his knowledge of what they had in mind. It's not his fault, and he deserves to appear on the card. It's a chance in a lifetime and I would not have him pass it up. At the end of the day ONE of us had to email the winning entry to Topps. Who needs to spend all that money chasing card variations anyways? Make sure to send plenty of cards

Either way, I am sure that 98% of you are tired of hearing about this subject anyways, I just wanted to to clear up any confusion when the set gets release in a month or so!

Alright, enough already. On with the collection!