Stadium Club 2018 - The Card Swap Experience

On Wednesday, we did our third 2018 Stadium Club break. There were already two "Grade The Break" write-ups about the other two (First one - Second one), and aside from a future mixer, I'd say we are done with Stadium Club. A breaker had a good idea about doing the write up more about the set in general rather than the last break. The last break was slightly better than the others but still underwhelming. Between the three breaks, retail, and personal ripping, here is the final tally of what we opened: 10 Hobby Boxes, 2 Blaster Boxes, 15 Retail Rack/Fat Packs.

Stadium Club was a favorite set as a kid, and I was excited when they brought it back in 2014. Aside from 2014, the sets since then all have a very similar look and they kind of all run together. But the key here is quality of the card and the nice photos used. With the big rookies this year, variations, parallels, Beam Team, and Instavision in these packs, there was a lot of hype going into Stadium this year.

I'm sure other breakers and personal rippers had good experiences with Stadium Club this year, but that was not our experience. It pains me to say, but Stadium Club did not treat The Card Swap very well. I got lucky on some retail but that was it. The 10 hobby boxes we ripped we pretty lame in most aspects. Here are some key points to point out:

*** In all of that Stadium Club, there was NOT ONE Ohtani base Rookie Card! Let that digest. That means if I had been buying these boxes to complete a base set, I would not have one. Well done Topps. To me, this is crazy. I hear stories of people getting four in a box. or one a box. So I am not sure what happened. 8 of the boxes were purchased from the same case and the other stuff separate. We did pull a Special Forces insert in a hobby box.

*** Just in the 10 boxes, 5 of the autos were the same guys. This was the biggest disappointment out of all of the disappointments from my end. This is so frustrating, maybe not as bad on the breakers because they may only see one of them being pulled. With the checklist of RC Autos in the set, this was not a great thing. Not like the 2014 box I opened and had two Mookie Betts RC Autos in it. The five autos we rec'd two of were AJ Minter, Velera, Caratini, Alex Mejia, and Miguel Gomez. Just wish there was more variety for everyone.

***In those 10 boxes, we rec'd one Gold Minted Parallel, and One InstaVision. I received a Gold Minted and a InstaVision in back to back retail rack packs. This seemed weird to me.

*** Unless I missed something, I opened 2 Short Print Variations. Amed Rosario and Will Clark. One came in a box and one was retail. That explains why the variations are holding their value. I am sure they are more rare than most variations, but I also think they aren't as rare as we saw them.

*** Numbered Cards were almost non-existent in the hobby boxes, I rec'd a #'d Beam Team of Trout and a #'d red auto in the retail stuff. Other than the Altuve auto, we received a Pujols Rainbow Foil /25. This again was super weird to me, and really was finding a hard time figuring what the point of buying hobby boxes was.

*** Three veteran/legend autos were opened. Jose Canseco, Tommy Pham, and the best card we opened, Jose Altuve /15

*** Was cool to pull the Manny Machado Chrome out of this set. Loved the Beam Team set more than even in previous years. Would love to add the Ohtani to my collection.

My opinion of Stadium Club as a set has definitely dropped. My opinion of Topps in general continues to drop at an alarming rate. It's making me second guess the case of the Topps Chrome that I have in my cart and ready to purchase. It's absolutely making it official that I will be breaking Football in the offseason! Will be looking forward to breaking other licensed products that are not Topps. I type this minutes after seeing that Topps and MLB extended their exclusive contract to 2025. Maybe its just our experience, but from other stuff I have seen, retail seems to be more value than buying the Hobby boxes. Usually its the other way around. Not sure if there is a benefit to even buying Hobby if they are going to load up retail.

Would only make sense to assign a grade to our experience with Stadium Club. This is very difficult because the cards look beautiful as usual, all of the disappointments are in how the cards were distributed. Factoring in the look, distribution of teams, lack of ohtani, dupe autos, and more. The experience overall I give Stadium Club...

D

That's all I got for now about Stadium Club, I'm sick of thinking about it. haha. Lots more things to look forward to. Excited to see what pull in Bowman Platinum, Ginter, and Optic. Check out our upcoming breaks. I am in the process of planning another Ginter, more Inception, and working on my purchase of Topps Chrome. Details to those coming soon. Thanks everyone to following along as we broke Stadium Club. On to the next stuff!