Sneak Peek at 2017 Heritage

About a week ago, I finally picked up my Topps Series one jumbo box and the associated silver packs. It was so much fun ripping those packs, but as has been the story with much of what is going on in my collecting life over the last few months, I haven't scanned/written up said fun. At any rate, since I just busted my first real look at Flagship, my internal product release calendar was way off. Subsequently, when I walked into my local Target while on my lunch break today, I had no clue that I was going to see new product staring back at me from the shelves of the card aisle. I was looking for one of the Topps blister packs that had four packs and one of the 'fielding award' cards(I hoped to find one with Brett Gardner) or another Road to WrestleMania jumbo packs. Instead I found this:

Heritage was on the shelf a day early! As an added bonus, my hanger box had this stuck to the front of it:

That will be important later. I probably wouldn't have grabbed a loose pack of Topps since they were all clearly searched. Hey, a free pack is a free pack so I picked one from the gravity feed box and hoped that it would at least have one of the 1987-themed inserts. More on this in a bit. Let's take a brief look at what came out of the Heritage hanger box.

First things first, here are a few of the more interesting of the plain old base cards. I chose to show Duffy since he is with the Rays now and there really wasn't much other competition for 'interesting' or 'exciting'. Obviously, I chose Bartolo so everyone could see him in all his airbrushed Braves glory. I added Kershaw because he's one of the best pitchers in the game right now and there wasn't much other competition for 'interesting' or 'exciting'. Sounds like there's an echo in here, but that's what the contents of this hanger box had me thinking over and over.

I will say that I like the All-Topps(AS) subset. I pulled five total from this portion of the base set. These were my three favorites of the bunch(Kershaw and Scherzer not shown).

The Russell is a High Number SP. To top all, it looks as though the 1968 Game set makes a return this year in two distinct forms. The Manny in the middle is part of a 30 card set while the Jake Thompson RC is from a 15 card, Target-exclusive set that focuses on 2017 rookies. Topps decided to borrow from a different 'Game-like' set by making the regular set with blue backs and the rookie set with red backs. Though not historically accurate, I think it's a really nice and easy way to distinguish between the two while giving a nod to the 1951 set. Man, it looks like I'm going to have 45 more 'Game' cards to track down. I haven't even finished the set from that time they put these in Archives...

Anyway, let's move on to the loose pack of Flagship. As I flipped through the stack, I was mostly underwhelmed at first glance.

These were my highlights. I was thrilled to pull the Judge RC and I was indeed fortunate enough to pull one of the 1987's(a need at that). Almost immediately it occurred to me that guy in the middle didn't look the way I remembered seeing him while recently busting my jumbo box. A quick glance at the code on the back confirmed my hope/suspicion that I had just pulled the SSP photo variation of Mr. MVP/World Series Champ, Kris Bryant. Those fall at a whopping 1:566 packs and I pulled one of the most popular guys on the series one variation checklist! Unbelievable! I think my adrenalin is still pumping. Guess those pack searchers at my local Target couldn't pick out all of the good stuff. That was one heck of a free pack! Thanks for reading.