Product Review: 2013 Topps Heritage Hobby Box

1964 is the year for 2013 Topps Heritage. Bringing along with it the historic and classic Topps look when it first debuted. The White border on this design really stands out and provides a very solid salute to the 1964 set. Heritage is one of those sets that you can go either way on it, a lot of this depends on the design but some more love the old feeling of the cards bringing them back to the older days. Either way this year is sure to bring some excitement into the famous brand.

Lets get to some basics first, on the hobby boxes your looking at the typical 24 packs with 9 cards per pack. Each Hobby box comes with a Box Topper that could be a Three card advertising panel, Oversize Box loader, Oversize Box loader Relic or Autograph, Buyback Originals, or Beatles Buybacks.
Short prints run wild in this years product at a ratio of 1:3 packs and provide us with 75 within the 500 card complete set. In addition to the 75 SP's we also will be hunting down 25 Action Image variations, 25 Color variations, 6 Error Print variations and 4 Super Short Prints of Washington Senators variations (which includes Bryce Harper). Heritage has been known for the short prints but this years list takes the cake in terms of long lasting value (at least so far).

This years Chrome version numbered out of 999 looks great with the White really coming out in the cards. Only 100 from the 500 set in the Chrome parallel version, each with purple, refractor, black and gold. These are always sot after cards in the secondary market and should continue in 2013.

New this year to Heritage is a 100 card Mini Parallel set. These Mini cards complement 100 cards from the 500 base/sp set and are each hand numbered to only 100! Along the inserts line are 1964 Mint Set (with coins embedded into the cards), 1964 Bazooka inserts, 1964 Coin Relics, 1964 US Postage Stamp relics, Baseball Flashbacks, Memorable Moments, New Age Performers, News Flashbacks, and Now and Then inserts.

The most famous items within Heritage are the Real One Autographs. Of course they are in this product and are as follows; Real One Autographs Blue Ink, Red Ink /64 along with Dual /25 or less and Triple Autographs /5, not to mention you can also find 1964 Cut Signatures /1. And rounding out the inserts/hits are the relics. You will find an assortment of the Clubhouse Collection Relics, including Dual Relics and Autographed versions, Esteemed Heritage Book cards, and Flashback Autograph Relics.

With so much packed into this product, your bound to find some good hits and maybe a surprise or two with your box. Here is how we did on ours:

Base Cards: 194 (no doubles)
Base SP: 7 - Posey, Pujols, Chen, Stanton, Diamond, J. Reyes, Buchholz
SP Photo Variations: 2 - Pujols & Dickey
Chrome Parallel: HC95 Mike Olt and Jurickson Profar /999
News/Baseball Flashbacks: 4 - Beatles, 1964 World's Fair, F.Robinson, Al Kaline
New Age Performers: 3 - Castro, Miley, Mauer
Memorable Moments: 2 - Fielder & Beltran
Then and Now: 2 - Robinson/Cabrera & Clemente/Posey
Autograph: Tom Brown (Blue Ink)

Looking back through the cards we couldn't have asked for a better box. This was packed with some of the top SP's, inserts and a Blue Ink Autograph. A couple things standout to us, the first being this was loaded with rookies. We had 12 Rookie cards pulled not including the Chrome Olt/Profar parallel. Great assortment for this product to have this many included. The SP's were easy to find in this box as the Pujols and Dickey Photo Variations were int he middle of the packs flipped over. Not sure if this in every box for the photo variations, but it makes it much better than going through each card twice to check. We didn't hit any of the harder SP's but we were pleased with landed some of the top player SP's that will be great on the secondary market.

Our Real One Autograph was of Tom Brown. You haven't heard of him? Well neither did we until we looked him up. The cool thing about Heritage Real One autographs is just this, you can pull one out of your box of an unknown and look him up to find out more info on the player. Due to the fact some of these players aren't well-known makes it interesting. Take our Tom Brown, turns out he only played 1 season with the Senators before being optioned. The interesting part is he played for the Green Bay Packers during 64-68 and played in the first two Super Bowls! Pretty cool to be optioned by a MLB team only to move into the NFL and win a couple of Super Bowls.

So overall we are pleased with this product. The design, the assortment of SP's to be found, the Relics, the inserts and the Real One Autographs all make this another great Heritage product.

Gambler Overall Rating: 4.2 out of 5
Cost: 5/5
Autograph: 4/5
Parallels/Inserts: 4/5
Design: 4/5
Concept: 4/5
Fun Aspect: 4/5