Topps has just released this year's Heritage. It's copying the 77 Topps design. Heritage is mostly a set builders product. It's not the type of product people buy in order to get "hits". A lot of the parallels and inserts really suck, and tend not to be on theme with Heritage's vintage style. That means these days Heritage is pretty niche, because there hardly seems to be any collectors left in a hobby filled with people looking to gamble.
A lot of breakers and these sorts describe Heritage as boring and repetitive. Well, yes. If you aren't building the base set, then I just don't get the point of buying it. To tell you the truth, the only base cards that seem worth having are Heritage and flagship. It's not that flagship is any good, but just that it is the main Topps line and there's still some attraction to completing that set since it's been going for many decades now.
Fanatics is completely antithetical to Heritage's concept. This is a company that is the complete opposite of honouring sports heritage. They are about churning out low quality crap in high numbers and making a fast buck. The company is a bunch of douchebag financebros who make crappy jerseys and crappy sports cards in a world completely run by hedge funds that have created a society that is just one massive wealth transfer from poor to rich.
I find most of what Topps is doing to be boring as fuck. Why do they even bother with base cards in most of their sets? Like if they just stopped doing base in Chrome, would anyone care? Upper Deck is the same way. I have a bunch of base cards I got from Allure hockey. I'm definitely not building that set. No one is. What's the point of these cards?
To me, base cards are about building a set that is a comprehensive review of the players from that season. So, if you want to look back at 1977 baseball, you can flip through a binder of 77 Topps and see all their smiling baseball player faces looking back at you. You can review their stats, see who was on what team, see the league leaders, record breakers, highlights, all that stuff. It's a commemorative photo album of a snapshot in time that can be collected, assembled, and enjoyed for as long as you like.
That is what is meant to work with Heritage. It's a large base set that is comprehensive. Because it is using designs from the past, which are almost invariably better than modern base card designs, it has great aesthetics. You can collect and collate Heritage and look back at it and say, "Look at baseball in 2026. Remember baseball? It's been locked out for three years now."
But I don't think Fanatics understands or appreciates their card market. It's just a cash grab, bleeding gamblers with terrible odds on addictive products. Opening new wax is toxic. Heritage is meant to be a set that bypasses all that, but with an uneven design, awful collation, terrible quality control, and lord knows whatever other problems, it seems not worth collecting. If that's the case, what's left for set builders? To get lost, because Fanatics only markets to gamblers. And also to children, so they can become addicted to gambling young. It's our era's new cigarette.
Anyway, this is a 77 Topps Nolan Ryan I grabbed on Ebay. I thought about building both the 77 Topps and this year's Heritage at the same time as a fun project. Seems like a cool idea, right? Well, I'm not sure if I am going to bother. I doubt I will bother with set building anymore at all, for the most part. Even vintage it's so much easier to just buy key cards and specific things I want and leave the commons for someone else.
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