Understanding Ginter

Trying to come to terms with the latest Topps release.

For the second year in a row, I managed to completely ignore the release of the unfortunately named Topps Allen & Ginter's (hereafter referred to as Allen & Ginter, A&G or just Ginter) for several weeks until I just couldn't help myself. I bought myself a value pack on Sunday, one of those things at Target that nets you 3 regular packs and some sort of bonus. This set is... fine. For the umpteenth year in a row, however, I feel myself missing some of the minimalist feel of the early Ginter sets and have my doubts that anything Topps designed for this has anything to do with the original A&G cards they are supposedly paying tribute to.

First off, this may as well be a Gypsy Queen insert card. I don't collect Gypsy Queen. It feels unnecessary and sometimes kind of ugly. Gypsy Queen inserts, on the other hands, are usually very well designed. I like it when people send me these (when they're Cardinals, obviously.) However, I couldn't give a rip about accumulating Gypsy Queen cards. This is well designed, but I don't see why these are a part of the Allen & Ginter set. I usually either think something is wrong or that I pulled some sort of weird hit if I get a card out of an Allen & Ginter pack that doesn't have a white border.

The base design is a bit noisy, but I could probably get used to it. The team name is pretty much getting shouted at us, but we don't see this all that often in modern card designs. I'm okay with it. Again, I prefer the minimalist approach when it comes to A&G, but I can't complain too much about this. I chose a horizontal card because this just happens to look really nice. I don't remember Ginter having many (any?) horizontal base cards in the first years of these sets but I know it happened eventually.

This is a plane, I guess. I should probably care about this?

The minis look pretty nice when you consider that they probably had to get created with the space and fitting the team name in. I am guessing this is a black bordered mini as the base cards don't have any kind of border.

Here's the bonus for buying a value pack. It looks like they brought back the gold bordered mini concept from 2012, which I guess I can't complain about. I don't remember what they did last year. In fact, I think that maybe they didn't have these value packs at all last year.

I absolutely cannot stand numbers and symbols replacing letters in words, so I hate this insert set. I hate it with fire. So stupid.

On the other hand, we have cats! I like cats.