Pack of the Day 132: 2016 Topps UFC High Impact

Topps recently released an online-exclusive UFC set called High Impact. I wanted to try it out, so I ordered up one pack from their e-store to see what I could pull. The base checklist is decent and there are some potentially good autographs as well as quite a few lesser signatures.

Here is my crappy photo of the box front with the shrink wrap still on it. The lighting in my house is terrible for photography, and my lack of skill just magnifies the issue.

Here is my blurry photo of the back of the box. There are 20 cards in a box, broken down as 16 base cards, 2 parallels, 1 Femme Fighters insert, and one autograph. Blue parallels are unnumbered, Red parallels are 1:11 boxes and # / 8, and Gold parallels are # 1 / 1 and seeded 1:34 boxes. 

The cards all come in a plain silver pack inside the box. Nothing too crazy there.

Here's a look at a horizontal base card. It's pretty standard for a Topps UFC card product. I would like to see more stats or something on the card backs. The UFC website has plenty of strike charts, percentages for submissions / TKOs / decisions, and similar stuff. I wouldn't think it would be too hard to come up with something like that.

Almost all of the cards are cut wrong, with the top and bottom slanted a bit from the sides. They're more parallelogram than they are rectangular. I already purchased a base set from an eBay seller who had a good price on the cards, so these are all extras for me.

The horizontal cards are pretty similar to the vertical ones. The backs are oriented in the same direction as the fronts. You can't sell Ronda Rousey base cards for a mint these days, but you could probably get enough out of it to cover shipping and eBay/Paypal fees.

One thing the horizontal cards are better for is showing in-fight photos. For the most part the vertical shots feature introduction or post-fight individual pictures, but the horizontal pictures give enough space to show fighters throwing a punch or kick.

In some sets this can be a little confusing, but I think in this set you can pretty much tell that the fighter whose face you can see is the one named on the card. I think it was Champions or Chronicles this year that had the same photo on both fighters' cards. Joanna Jedrzejczyk is pretty popular among the collectors these days, so I didn't do too bad as far as base cards go.

My two parallels were the basic Blue version. To distinguish them they took the white fade from the base cards and colored it. I got a Red parallel in a box break the other day, but it hasn't shipped yet. I would imagine it looks like these, only Red. No holofoil or anything. You can kind of see on the Luke Rockhold card that these are cut diagonally just like the base cards. My parallels are both fighters whose base cards I pulled. I'm not sure if that is a regular thing, but with 16 base cards out of a 50-card set the odds are pretty good that you'll get matches.

My Femme Fighters insert is Holly Holm, a pretty good pull from this box. This insert set has 20 cards on the checklist. You only get one per box and with the popularity of the female fighters in the collecting world this could wind up being a pretty expensive checklist to put together. There's an auction up with a Buy It Now of $150 for the 20-card set, which is about what I figured up as a good baseline for it. Another auction from the same seller with the same picture closed at $54, which is a steal in my opinion. I am kind of interested in watching the feedback of the seller to see if they backed out of that sale.

I came away with one of the better autographs on the checklist, pulling a Georges St-Pierre signature card. I definitely can't complain about that. I've seen a few box breaks of this product, and this is one of the best autographs I've seen pulled so far. His last fight was long before I started watching UFC, and incidentally that fight was against the guy on the first card in this post, Johny Hendricks. The one copy of this card that has been sold so far went for a bit more than I paid for the box, so this break overall is a win for me.

When it comes to High Impact I will probably quite while I'm ahead. There are some good autographs in the product and with a small checklist you have a decent chance of pulling a nice parallel or a good Femme Fighters insert, but ultimately it's a lottery ticket. I've seen ten or twelve boxes of this opened, and this was the best one out of that sample size. There are a couple of cards I still want from the set, but I will try to track them down on the secondary market.