I have read it typed that all Topps designs "grow on you eventually."
One that took longer than most for me was/is 1978 Topps - the very first set of Baseball Cards I actually collected to full completion. I was quite proud of that, at the time.
Some 12 years later, I exchanged that set, and the next 3 after it, for an epic vacation which I will never forget. I am a little less proud of that funding source, but, epic.
Ever since I have had those 4 sets on my mind, particularly when the designs re-appear in the 21st century.
The nostalgia was notably lacking for the 1978 set, compared to the others. Back in year 1978, I wasn't so enthused about the design. After being introduced to Baseball Cards with bright colors and dynamic graphics, I now had a card with a team name in cursive, reminding us kids of homework in grade school. And little else. A player name and a baseball with the POS in it. That's all, kids.
This same nostalgia surfeit seemed in play back at Topps, which would seemingly prefer to recycle a design a 3rd time before ever manning up to revisit 1978. When that finally happened at scale (100 card checklist) in 2022 Archives, the set was constructed with lots and lots of fake backgrounds — a truly disturbing trend at the time that probably peaked in that set.
That didn't help rekindle a desire to revisit 1978, at all.
But meanwhile, I knew of an easily overlooked re-use of 1978 Topps that occurred back in 2018:
2018 Topps "On Demand 1978 Tribute"
Now of course anyone familiar with 1978 Topps will notice a missing element instantly. A famous 2010s player was like, what's up here?
Far be it from me to explain how Topps could forget to put a baseball on a Baseball Card.
A bigger loss is an effort on the back that couldn't even be called "phoning it in" -
And here I like the little game that should be included on a 1978 Topps card back, and have a big plan for it, some day, hopefully to be seen here, eventually.
But for me, I wasn't noticing the "modern take" loss, as much as the gain - full bleed, yet framed. Has this ever been done on another trading card design? Probably. But, also probably, not very often, at all. I quite liked this major change to original 1978.
A nice way to keep full bleed all without white borders effectively shrinking the image size. Occasionally, this can cause problems though -
oops
One would think that by 2018, Topps coulda figgered out a software way to improve the cropping here; something it seems has been a bit better as the 2020s roll along now.
Another thing that intrigued me about the little 30 card set was finding a few Candids mixed into the usual Baseball action:
these, I always like in a set of Baseball Cards
Now a simple 30 card checklist is essentially no different than an insert checklist, and whenever one revisits a small checklist some reminiscing will be involved -
the classic 1977 Topps wrapper pose
or, the classic 2011 Topps Update pose?
(I hope Night Owl's Night Card binder still needs a #21, but I doubt this)
and sometimes, reminiscing gets, odd
who?
And of course, we can't have a checklist of Topps Baseball Cards that doesn't include .... Rookies. Which is so often where reminiscing can get even weirder still:
This is actually a very nice Baseball Card; I always like the appearance of the Padres 'camo' uniform on a card.
Still, on these small checklists, the Rookies can so easily become very distracting, years later, after they haven't become famous. Particularly when other Rookies on the very same checklist become, a GOAT.
And like many a Rookie Card card, finding it years later just results in a far more puzzling "Who?" than one about a faded star from a previous decade. Although I expect my Baseball Cards to answer that question for me, via the cards that appear after the RC card, that option really wasn't coming to mind for me with Christian Villanueva.
Normally I quite like following the Mexican born players in MLB, as tengo amigos de Mexico. Villanueva's career, however, has to be followed by baseball-reference.com as he played just one season in MLB for a reason I can't discern, despite a seemingly successful 2018 campaign. He is still playing Baseball, but back home in Mexico, where no one makes Baseball Cards.
This pleasant trip back to 2018, and 1978, finally became a completed collecting project just recently, when I finally found a For Sale listing that I long expected, even though I already owned a third or so of this set from individual card purchases on COMC. That was a listing for just 29 of the 30 cards. Which existed because:
This is of course THE card from this particular Baseball Picture Card product. Luckily, I had already made the rare (for me) hard decision to spend a two digit sum on this single Baseball Card back during the season when the GOAT demonstrated his mastery of yet another part of playing Baseball, that being running the bases.
I decided that a nice way to make a unique Shohei Ohtani collection would be to simply collect his (very) occasional base-running card, rather than the thousands of pitching & hitting cards available. But you can't really have much of a collection of Baseball Cards without including a Rookie Card card, can you? I can, easily, but I just really wanted this particular card from the small set I was already partly through collecting anyway. This one is very much an In Action card, something not always the case even with base-running cards. I spent just a modestly upper two figure sum of bummin-around-money obtained on COMC by selling off random other low-leverage Ohtani cards pulled from packs, though of course only the ones from after 2018. This card is now a mid three figures card and a winner of the grading lottery might even get four figures for a copy of this one.
Unfortunately the 30 card checklist only has 8 Rookies so I can't quite fit it into my new paradigm of placing Rookies altogether on their own, more easily forgotten page of cards, rather than mixing them in with the Stars of the day. And really I would need the checklist to be 10 RC cards long, as that Ohtani card is now worth a bit more than is best for 9 card page storage, going forward. That's a bit of a shame as I thought it would perfectly anchor a simple page of 9 base-running cards but that's probably not to be, now. Even though I still quite look forward to assembling that page.
Meanwhile this little set presents other binder-ing problems. With essentially nothing to ever look at on the back of the cards, basic 18 cards/page is the way to go with such cards. But what if there are 29 cards? That calls for 7 additions but I think I found a set for that...
...I actually put this (actually 50¢) card in the Buy pile on-sight, instantly, a few moths ago — because I had already forgotten all about 2022 Archives and I was seriously wondering when else Topps had revisited 1978. All despite never ever warming up to Gerrit Cole Baseball Cards, even though I would be more than happy to take him fishing and listen to his Baseball stories.
I guess I had successfully tried to block memories of perhaps the most abominable set of the 2020s, with all those faked backgrounds chock-a-block all over the checklist.
Another option would be to procure the further 10 cards from 2018 Topps On Demand 1978 Tribute, which were inserted into the 2,040 sets produced at a rate of 2 cards/box, meaning there are only 100-ish copies of each one. Those feature players from the year 1978 and I very much wants those, too, but I also just run out of energy trying to chase cards with just 3 digit print runs. I so despise being stuck in a Limited Edition Hobby, so often. Anyhow,
The Results
