Tuesday 27 January 2009

2009 Baseball Attax

Back in December I caught this post from bdj610bbcblog and Wax Heaven about Topps Attax baseball and have had a post waiting in the dashboard.
Match Attax Football and Slam Attax Wrestling have been pretty big in the UK. If you didn't catch them. Chris from Stale Gum has busted a few packs of football (soccer) and reviewed them on You Tube and Mario did this post on the Slam Attax cards.
I think the popularity caught Topps by surprise. We are well behind the US when it comes to quantity and quality of cards about 'Our National Pastime' and the game used soccer cards are a out there but it appears primarily for the American market.
I don't know whether the newest stickers available called Topps Total Football have been in the pipeline for a while and they (being Topps) have slowly led us down the memorabilia path but they have gone all out with colour supplements in magazines and a pretty impressive television ad campaign.
Included in 2009 are 20,000 signed stickers, one player from each of the 20 Premiership clubs, signing 1,000 sticker. There are a few big names to whet the appetite. A redemption card is included in the pack to send away for the signed sticker. Sounds familiar.
Back to the reason for the post - Baseball Attax. The reason why Match Attax and Slam Attax were so popular was the price. 40pence for football and 50pence for wrestling. Boxes of the football cards, going for a reasonable £30.00 were being whipped off the shelves. These were not 1 pack, 1 card packs or even 10 pack, 10 card boxes, but 100 packs of 6card football packs. Maybe it isn't in the same league as Sweet Spot or Sterling. It did however get adults into collecting more than they had before and drew children by their 1o,ooo's into the collecting market.
What will Topps charge for the Baseball Attax cards? 99c for 4 card booster pack and $7.99 for a 34 starer pack. This is a potential product to draw NEW young collectors back into a hobby, which needs them. Why not charge 99c for 10 cards? If you have some doubles, trade them or here's an old concept 'flip them'. They only cost 99cents.

1 comment:

dayf said...

Man, if Topps came out with a Topps Total baseball set that was STICKERS I'd be in heaven. The latest issue fo Beckett for Hockey has a Panini album packaged with it and I was tempted to get it even though 1) I don't follow hockey anymore and 2) I have no idea where to buy stickers to put in the album.