Pack of the Day 113: 2015 Topps WWE Undisputed

When Topps announced that they would be releasing a new high-end wrestling product called WWE Undisputed I knew I wanted to try some of it out, but I couldn't stomach the $200+ price tag on a box of the stuff. I found an online breaker who was selling the product by the pack and decided to give it a try. The pack promises 5 total cards, with one being an autograph or autograph relic card.

First up are the base cards and parallels I pulled. The cards are quite thick and remind me of the Star Wars Masterwork cards that were released earlier this year. The design is a bit different, but the thickness and texturing on the cards feels similar. The photos of the wrestlers are glossy cutouts and the backgrounds have a matte finish. That Edge card is a Silver parallel and is numbered # 17 / 25. It doesn't have a special finish or anything, just a slightly different pattern on the background. None of these are really wrestlers I collect, but the cards are cool enough. I guess the Bret "The Hit Man" Hart card is my favorite from this batch. I'm not sure which Hogwarts House that uniform on Cameron is supposed to represent. Slytherin, maybe? I remember watching Edge wrestle in my late teen years when my sisters and I would gather around the TV in my room and watch wrestling every week. My wife and I also saw him and Lita beat Kane when WWE RAW came to Idaho in 2005.  WWE is a great event to attend live, even if you're not that into wrestling. The best part of that event for me, though, was getting to see Roddy Piper and Sgt. Slaughter wrestle live. There was a several year period where the WWE came to Boise, but I don't think they've been back since 2010. I wish they would because going is a lot of fun, but we seem to get passed over for a lot of that kind of stuff since we're stuck in a black hole between Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, and Seattle.

The card backs feature a few demographic tidbits like height, weight, and hometown. This is followed up by a few bullet points with highlights from the wrestler's career. It's a nice, clean design.

There are a couple of inserts in the product. I pulled a Famous Finishers card of Undertaker's Tombstone move. It's a decent insert, although the idea has been used a few times before. I guess it's hard to find a lot of things that haven't been done yet on cardboard, though, and a wrestler's signature closing move is a pretty big part of their persona. The Tombstone isn't the most photogenic move out there.

I pulled a decent hit card, with an Autograph Relic Card of Dolph Ziggler. I'm not too familiar with him, as he came around after I'd moved away from following the WWE very closely. A brief look at his Wikipedia entry tells me he's probably a decent guy. I would get back into watching the WWE, but I've got so many hobbies that it's hard to make time for it. Based on the box breaks I've watched of this product, this Dolph Ziggler relic auto is a pretty common pull. I guess they had a lot of his stickers.

The back of the Famous Finishers card features a write-up about the move, as well as a particular highlight of a time when the wrestler used the move in a particularly memorable way. It would be cool if the picture on the front matched the highlight on the back, but it doesn't. The back of the autograph relic features the standard congratulatory message.

Overall this is a pretty nice product, in my opinion. Like any hit-driven product, you are going to miss far more often than you hit. There are some pretty good names on the checklist, as well as the usual array of filler hits. I would really have liked to get a hit featuring The Iron Sheik, John Cena, or maybe Randy Orton or The Big Show. The Diva hits appear to be pretty popular. Notable names that are missing include Hulk Hogan and Paige, but Pete Rose makes a surprise appearance for Topps in a non-baseball product with an autograph in the checklist. I don't know that I'd pony up for a whole box of this stuff, but it would be a nice product for the occasional pack or single hit purchased from eBay.