A Cool 2015 Star Wars Masterwork Sketch and a Big Rant on 2016 Star Wars Masterwork

I didn't intentionally time things this way, but 2016 Star Wars Masterwork came out yesterday, and it has caused quite a ruckus. I will rant about that after featuring today's card, though.

This sketch card comes from the 2015 Star Wars Masterwork product, which was probably the first real high end Star Wars trading card product. There was a lot to like about 2015 Star Wars Masterwork, like at least one sketch per box (my box had two sketches!), on-card autographs, relics from the bunker in Return of the Jedi, stamp cards, and some manu-relics to act as filler hits. It was a pretty cool product, and I think fans overall really enjoyed it. The base set had a lot of hard-to-pull short-printed cards, so even collecting that was a challenge. I got a full non-SP base set, but I couldn't handle the asking price on the SP's.

Back to the sketch, which is a Princess Leia sketch done by Jon Morris, an artist I actually met in person at the 2012 Emerald City Comic Con. I like his art style, and I was happy to add his distinctive art style to my Princess Leia sketch collection. It is a black-and-white sketch with relatively simple lines, but you can tell that he put some work into it. There is shading, there are extra details throughout, and there's some background work done. I like it a lot.

Now I want to talk about 2016 Topps Star Wars Masterwork. In the run-up to the product release, the sell sheets promised some cool stuff. Things like:

On-Card Autographs!

Death Star Relics!

Stormtrooper and Bespin Guard Costume Relics!

Stamp Relics!

Medallion Relics!

A-List Sketch Artists!

Topps even released a list of sketch artists beforehand that included some real heavy hitters in the sketch card game, like the Glebe brothers, whose sketches could be considered case hits, rivaled in value only by the biggest of autographs and the rarest of parallels.

Then things started to go bad. The product was delayed. Topps announced that the highly-anticipated Death Star and costume relics were no longer going into the product. At least a dozen sketch artists (about a quarter of the artists on the original list), including the Glebe's and other popular names, were cut from the final checklist due to approval problems or timing issues. The final sketch artist list and numbers were revealed just prior to release, and you could see that some unpopular artists made up the bulk of the sketch card run.

Then people actually started to open the product, and found that they were averaging one sketch card per case (some people have found two; some zero). That's one per case, when last year I found two in one box! And based on the sketch card checklist that was released, that one sketch has a 13.5% chance of being a Robert Teranishi sketch. Teranishi is best known for churning out duplicate sketches that are generally panned for lack of detail or originality, and he has 1/7th of the sketches in the whole product. Other lackluster sketches have surfaced. The autograph checklist is extremely watered-down. A large number of autographs are stickers! Some are on-card, but many are not. The BIG ANNOUNCED AUTOGRAPH in the product, ADAM DRIVER / KYLO REN, is a REDEMPTION and not packed out live in the product!

So let's go back and revisit the sell sheet stuff:

Some On-Card Autographs!

Death Star Relics!

Stormtrooper and Bespin Guard Costume Relics!

Stamp Relics!

Medallion Relics!

A-List Sketch Artists, But Good Luck Finding One!

Prices on boxes have dropped 10% or so within a day of release. The Topps Star Wars Facebook page is getting hammered with complaints. They responded by promising that the high-end sketches were too late to get put into Masterwork, but would probably be packed out as extra hits in other products. People are filing Better Business Bureau complaints for false advertising and bait-and-switch selling. The Blowout forum thread on the product has descended into a spiral of negativity.

On the plus side, the Stamp Relics look pretty cool and the base cards and parallels look nice enough. A few very nice sketches made it through the approval process somehow. The Medallion cards are okay-looking, too, but manu-relics, stamp relics, and bottom-tier autographs aren't going to carry a high-end product like this. The 2016 Topps Star Wars Masterwork set is a shameless and poorly-executed money grab. I'm glad I was entirely unaware of the release date, because I probably would have been one of the poor suckers left with an overpriced box on pre-order.

Odds are that the product won't actually be as bad as it seems right now. There will still be a little value there. The base sets are proving hard to build, which should drive up the value on those cards. There are still plenty of great sketch artists (Melike Acar, Ingrid Hardy, Kris Penix, Tim Proctor, Lee Lightfoot, and others) whose cards made it into the packout. Some key name autographs are live and on-card. It is just not all it was trumpeted to be, and that is disappointing, especially as the most premium product for a beloved property.