Pack of the Day 172: A Rack Pack of 2017 Topps WWE Heritage

This is a busy time of year, and it's hard to get myself to sit down and knock out a blog post sometimes. I do feel obligated to post, though, so it's lucky that I have a backlog of relatively easy posts sitting in my draft queue. Some of them aren't that exciting, but at least it's something new for people to see on their blogrolls.

Topps has been putting out a WWE Heritage product for a few years now. Some of the designs hearken back to earlier Topps wrestling sets, and some apply designs from other sports to the wrestling theme. I will usually pick up a pack or two each year to check it out, and then when the prices drop I'll pick up a box if the chance arises. The price usually gets pretty low after a year or so. I actually have a box of 2016 WWE Heritage on order right now, sitting alongside my Gint-a-Cuffs box for this year. The whole order is being held up because I pre-ordered a box of UFC Chrome, and the release date on that product got pushed back by a month or so. Ugh, I might not even get my Allen & Ginter box before Gint-a-Cuffs ends.

But enough about that. I picked up a rack pack of 2017 Topps WWE Heritage from Walmart a couple of weeks ago. It's got 15 cards in it plus a special Daniel Bryan tribute card, for a total of 16 cards. In other wrestling-related news, I got tickets for my family to see the WWE Live event here in Boise at the end of September. I am pretty excited about it. I've never been to a WWE Live show that wasn't fun.

Here are the odds from the back of the pack. There is the usual assortment of parallels, along with some inserts and hits with all their associated parallels.

This set is inspired by the 1987 Topps Baseball design, with the woodgrain texture that is so familiar. I thought the use of the Future Stars logo on new wrestlers was a nice touch. The card backs feature a fairly lengthy write-up of the pictured wrestler.

Here are the fronts of the rest of the base cards. NXT wrestlers get yellow text boxes, while RAW wrestlers ger red and SmackDown wrestlers get blue. The Rookie Trophy also gets put to use, as seen on Alexa Bliss' card. The All-Star design from 1987's baseball offering gets repurposed as a Legend set, as shown by the Scott Hall card in the lower right, with the classic WWE logo in the corner.

This Kalisto card is a Bronze parallel. It's a pretty understated parallel, standing out by being just a little darker shade of brown on the woodgrain. I'm assuming that other parallels are more obvious,

Here is the promised Daniel Bryan Tribute card. There are 40 cards total in the set, but I think this might be one of those inserts that Topps runs through several products over the year, so you have to buy some of everything to complete it.

The rest of the cards in the pack are inserts, which focus on SummerSlam events. The inserts in Heritage tend to be pretty extensive, with large checklists. That's why so much of the pack is devoted to them. They're really more subset than insert. I am not sure if these are based on past designs or if they're new retro-looking designs. The first insert is a Bizarre SummerSlam Matches insert featuring Kane.

I cut off the bottom of these cards in the scan, but I didn't feel like going back and re-scanning them. I got four cards from the Thirty Years of SummerSlam set and two cards from the SummerSlam All-Stars set.

Since he's up there in the scan, I have a little Brock Lesnar anecdote to share. A new guy just started in my section at work, and when I was talking about going to the WWE event he told us that he wrestled on the same team as Brock Lesnar in high school. He showed us some pictures of the team and said that Brock is pretty much the guy you would expect him to be from looking at him. So make of that what you will.

I had the same scanning issues when I did the backs of these cards, but I'm guessing you can imagine what the borders of the cards look like.

That's the end of this pack. I like WWE Heritage, but I also usually find myself bypassing it for something else. Maybe it's a perceived-value thing, as I will buy discounted WWE Heritage all day. I have similar feelings about the baseball Heritage line.