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Topps Platinum has started to pop up on eBay and though some of the cards remind us of chrome-y like goodness in a good way, others remind us of horribly laid out cards with oddly placed pictures, patches and stickers. Jeff from New Card Smell has posted his thoughts if you want a more positive take on things. My commentary is not going to be as favorable.
Im sure most of you are familiar with Bowman Chrome's disastrous rookie auto jersey cards from this year
. You know the ones where the jersey window obscurred a good part of the player picture? Yeah, I get a similar vibe off these cards, mainly because they are using the player picture in such a weird way.
Instead of building the card around a good and well thought out space for the player picture, they decided to shove it behind three photoshop layers of sticker spaces and chrome backgrounds. When you try something like that, your competition with SPA ends in a loss.
Now, you may say that this product is not meant to compete with SPA, but its tough to ignore when the price point and the box set up is pretty much the same. The difference is that SPA is all on card, and one of the favorite sons of the hobby, while this is a rehashed chrome bastard to get rid of stickers. I dont mind the regular base cards all that much, they could pass for chrome if they came out around the same cards. However, when you start getting up into the autos and especially the auto patches, things get awfully ugly.
We will see how more of the box breaks shake up, but so far, this stuff looks to be not worth your time.
Isn't this lovely? *sigh* This is what we have to look forward to INSTEAD of SPA in the future if UD is gone.
ReplyDeletePretty Fugly to me! No design balance, no continuity. Great idea design team... let's throw a patch in the middle of the card and right below it put the sticker auto! Heck, why don't we just make the card a whole patch! By the way... doesn't the card look mosly like a big glare??
ReplyDeleteI really like these cards. They do have a proper player photo (even if a small bit of it is obscured), there is a decent sized patch and there is a specific spot for the sticker auto. If they are attempting to compete with SPA, it's not a bad try given the fact they couldn't just rip off the general SPA design - instead they used their popular chrome/refractor technology.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do prefer on card autos, my big beef with them is that in some cases there is no specific place on the card for the autos to go on, and as such the signature goes anywhere on the card(or at least looks that way). Given the choice between that and sticker auto with a place on the card designed for it, I'll take the sticker auto.
Unfortunately there is no Favre patch/jersey auto in Platinum, so it it a bit like almost every SPA release for me - useless.
I think the product accomplishes what it was intended for, and I think the cards look spiffy. I see no major issues with it, I rather like them.
ReplyDeleteI like these cards because they are differant. Who ever said all cards have to look the same' I await my ordered hobby box of these and my pre-order of the Topps Unique.
ReplyDeleteI think those are some of their nicer looking football cards Topps has done in a while.
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