Black November, Act II - 2016 Topps UFC Top of the Class

I started this post series off yesterday with the product that spurred me to order from the Blowout Cards Black November sale, 20 blaster boxes of 2014 Press Pass Total Memorabilia racing cards. After adding that to my cart I mixed in a few other things, including a couple of lottery ticket breaks and something predictable that I was going to buy eventually anyway in one form or another.

The first lottery ticket was a box of 2016 Topps UFC Top of the Class cards, which is one of those premium hit-driven products with a bottom-heavy checklist. There is no base set, but there is a 25-card insert set with parallels that might as well be called the base set. In each 5-card box you get one insert, one insert parallel, two autographs, and one jumbo relic. I think there is something in the small print that says at least one of your hits will feature Johnny Case, Johny Hendricks, Travis Browne, or Jared Rosholt.

My Top of the Class insert card is Georges St-Pierre. He's a big name, but pretty much everyone in this checklist is a big name. You have to get down into the really rare parallels or the really big names if you want your base card to be considered a great pull.

My parallel is the basic unnumbered Black parallel of Daniel 'Anderson Silva's Warm Blanket' Cormier:

He did what he had to do to win, but man was that a boring fight to watch. It was so boring that it was memorable. That's hard to do. This was about the worst pull I could get as far as parallels are concerned, combining probably the least-popular guy on the checklist with the lowest level of rarity.

My Jumbo Relic card is the base variety, a Jessamyn Duke relic numbered # 104 / 199. I like the design on these relic cards. Duke won her first UFC fight, but went on to lose three in a row. She then dropped down to Invicta to get more fight experience and lost two more fights in a row. I am not sure if she plans on continuing as a fighter, but her hype arrow is pointing down right now.

My first autograph is the mandatory Case/Rosholt/Browne/Hendricks card of the bunch, an autograph card of Johny Hendricks. I do like the design of these cards, but this isn't a card that gets anyone excited.

My second autograph is an Autograph Relic card of Jake Collier, who is 2-2 (10-3 overall) in the UFC, against a bunch of guys I've never heard of. That makes this box a big dud. You'd be lucky to get a dollar out of each of these cards.

At this point I was feeling pretty bad about my Black November breaks. While the racing blasters weren't the worst ever, I probably wouldn't go back and spend that money on them again. This box of Top of the Class was about the worst box you could get from the product, though, from top to bottom. The one redeeming quality of this break was that I got a discounted price on the box, so I lost less money than I could have on it.