New Heritage, Finally

Yet another guy's opinion about the long-lasting Topps brand.

Friend of the blog Howard provided me with my very first Topps Heritage card of the (now not so) new year, which happened to be an Adam Wainwright jersey card. I really considered not buying any Heritage packs for myself at all, because it was only bound to go downhill from there.

I did finally cave and get a few packs, and I have to say that I really like what Topps did with this year's release, so far. They fixed my biggest complaint about last year's set, which is that the cards did not feel like Heritage cards, or anything even close to resembling the old style card stock. They were basically Allen & Ginter cards with the 1964 Topps design. I realize that actually '64 cards have light card backs, but they actually still feel like old cardboard and were thinner overall. This year's set, modeled of course after 1965 Topps, feels like a return to old style cardboard (of mostly new players.)

I'm not sure about the inserts yet and I haven't really read up on the variations and "errors", so I'm sure there are plenty of things to be critical about. And yes, 75 short printed cards at 1:3 packs makes it really tedious to try to collect all 500. I can assume that's never going away. At some point I'm also going to have to come to terms with the fact that they Photoshop cards like crazy in this product, especially as the photo quality improves by the year.

Oh man, Shelby, put a cap on.

Overall, I got a good feeling about these cards after the first few packs. I'll pick up some more next weekend and then get a want list up.

The Mariners are full of prospects. Some of them are bound to pan out, right?