Monday, March 1, 2021

Modern Monday - silver pack chrome

Today's card arrived in all its shiny glory hard on the heels of my first Tony Gwynn card from 2021. It came from Jeff in one of the UK collectors groups on Facebook. 

Card Number 605: Topps Silver Pack Chrome, 2021; #86BC-77

These chrome cards are included in the "Silver packs" inserted as bonuses in hobby boxes of Topps Series 1. It has a different picture of Tony than the regular 35th anniversary retro cards that make up a large insert set in the flagship Series 1 set. 


The scanner really activated the refractor card. I haven't done an overhead scan, but I did take a photo to pop on Instagram, so here's that for comparison (complete with a bit of my thumb):


There are 100 cards in both the insert set and the chrome cards from the silver packs. I've seen a lot of love for these cards in the collectors groups but it's not a template I've ever been particularly fond of. Of course, I own the original 1986 card, and I have an Archives card from 2014 that also uses this template so it isn't new to me. 

The cardback is pretty dull. It manages to be both a big stats box and an incomplete record. 


This is bizarre to me. If you are going to just have a massive stats box, why would you not have all 19 seasons on there? But the thing that annoys me the most about this is they start from 1988. It's a 1986 style card. Tony was playing in 1986. Couldn't they have squeezed 1986 on there? It just feels like a silly missed opportunity.

However, this is a very nice refractor card and it means I have a quarter of the checklist of Tony Gwynn cards from Series 1 already. I would like to add the other retro card and I will be keeping my eyes peeled for it.

Total: 605 cards


2 comments:

  1. Good point about the stats on the back. Not sure why they wouldn't include his career stats. They usually don't have any problems with using small fonts for these sorts of things. And that's really cool that you already have a quarter of Gwynn's 2021 Topps cards. Congratulations!

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