Pack of the Day 148: 2 Boxes of 2016 Topps UFC High Impact

I got home yesterday after two weeks in Utah for job training. The drive wasn't too bad. It rained and snowed most of the way through the 4-1/2 hour drive, but the roads weren't bad until I got to Boise. I didn't see any wrecks or anything until I got within 40 miles of home, and in those 40 miles I saw 5 or 6 wrecks, with 2 or 3 of those looking pretty serious. I didn't get tied up in any of it, though, and made it home without incident.

I was greeted by a giant pile of mail on and around my desk. I should have taken a picture of it, but I didn't get around to it. There were eBay winnings, trade packages, surprises, group break cards, commissioned artwork, and Black Friday purchases among the pile. I am still working on sorting and scanning it all so that I can post about it. I also have some packages to build and send out over the next few days. In the meantime, I picked up a couple boxes of 2016 Topps UFC High Impact from the Topps website a while back, and here is what I pulled from them.

High Impact is an online-exclusive set that was released in early 2016. The base checklist has 50 cards. There are parallels of the base set, one insert set, and autographs. Each box has 20 cards, with the breakdown being 16 base cards, 2 parallels, 1 insert, and 1 autograph.

The base cards are pretty standard stuff. Picture, name, and weight class on the front, biographical info on the back. The cards in the box I opened several months ago were miscut and hard to align on the scanner. This batch of cards was better. In the post on that first box I mentioned that I probably ought to quit while I was ahead. After this break was finished I found myself wishing that I had listened to me from the past.

Here are some of the horizontal base cards. With such a small checklist, Topps mostly focused on the bigger names in the UFC. I read somewhere that the UFC is going to open up another women's division at the 145 lb. Featherweight level, probably to help keep Cris Cyborg around. That's a pretty cool development.

Each box has two parallels. The unnumbered Blue parallel is the most common, but Red (# / 8) and Gold (1 / 1) are possible. All of my parallels in this batch were of the Blue variety, with Claudia Gadelha showing up in each box.

Femme Fighters is the only insert set in High Impact, with a 20-card checklist of female fighters. I pulled the first and last cards in the set, Julianna Pena and Liz Carmouche. It was disappointing that both of these inserts came out of the box with damaged corners, especially the Pena card. The top two corners were just mangled. I was pretty disappointed by that.

I saw this autograph and I was like, "Who?" Erik Perez is a Bantamweight fighter. I've seen him fight a few times, but I didn't remember it. What is interesting about this card is that he signed it with his nickname, 'Goyito.'

My second autograph was another guy whose name didn't ring a bell for me, James Vick. His most recent fight was a first-round knockout loss against Beneil Dariush at UFC 199 in June.

I guess not every break can be a winner. I already have a base set, but it would be cool to collect the Femme Fighters insert set. At one per box, though, it's not a very cost-effective pursuit. Singles are available out there, but the price tags attached to the big names are pretty high. I don't know if it's worth chasing.

UFC 206 is tonight. It will be interesting to see which fights Topps decides to commemorate with Topps NOW cards. My guess is that Max Holloway - Anthony Pettis and Donald Cerrone - Matt Brown get cards, but I don't know if any of the other fights on the card warrant a NOW release. I would say that the December 17th Fight Night has a better hobby lineup than UFC 206, but I really don't want Topps to start making NOW cards for Fight Nights.

2016 Topps UFC NOW - UFC 202

I've been picking up the Topps NOW UFC trading cards for each numbered UFC event, but each time one comes up I find myself wondering just how many fights Topps will choose to make cards for. I like the idea of having the complete set, but I just can't justify buying four or five NOW cards for each one.

So far they've done a pretty good job of at least alternating the number of cards per event, with 5 for the big UFC 200 event, 1 for UFC 201, 4 for UFC 202, 3 for UFC 203, and 2 for tonight's UFC 204. It's a tough balance, and I've been keeping an eye on the explosion in cards for the baseball version of Topps NOW as people on the forums drop out of the chase for that set under the onslaught of new cards being printed each day. There are people out there basically bankrupting themselves trying to keep up with the baseball set. I hope that Topps will keep the numbers down for the UFC cards, sticking with only the key fights in numbered UFC events. If they start digging down into Fight Nights or printing cards for every single main card fight on the numbered events, I will have to drop out. And based on the print runs for most of these things, that's like 1 percent of their revenue from the UFC cards gone!

Like I mentioned earlier, they made four cards for August's UFC 202. The big one was the Conor McGregor / Nate Diaz rematch, which McGregor won by split decision. This was by far the most-printed UFC NOW card at 636 copies, almost doubling the previous high of 320 set by the Brock Lesnar card from the UFC 200 group.

Anthony Johnson got the second card for UFC 202, and this one had a print run of 90 copies, which seems to be a little below average for these cards. If you count all 13 of the cards for UFC 200 through 203, the average print run is 168, but I think Lesnar and McGregor really skew those numbers. Taking out those two, the remaining 11 cards have an average print run of 112.

I kind of wondered why Cody Garbrandt's fight got included in Topps NOW, because it wasn't even on the Main Card. It was in the preliminaries. Someone at Topps must know that he has a hobby following, because this card had a print run of 214. Who knew?

The last card features Donald Cerrone's win over Rick Story. This one had a print run of 91 cards. It will be interesting to see what the print runs do for the two cards from UFC 204, because the ones from 203 really took a step down from the previous events. It kind of looks like someone who was buying in bulk for resale stepped out of the game after 202, because the print runs dropped by about 20 for 'regular' cards that don't feature big names (McGregor, Garbrandt), people with celebrity outside the UFC world (Lesnar), and female fighters (Nunes).

Not a whole lot to say about the card backs. They have a little write-up about the fight and that's about it. I enjoyed watching UFC 204 this evening. There were plenty of good fights. I was hoping that Bisping or Henderson would earn the finish in the last fight, but it went to a decision, with Bisping retaining his belt. As far as UFC Pick 'Em goes, I picked the first five fights wrong, then got the last six correct, ending up 6 / 11 on the night.

Seeking Redemption 18: Quick Turnaround

I posted just about a month ago that I had received a couple of Topps redemption cards from group breaks. Very shortly after I posted that I saw that both had gone live on Topps' weekly(ish) redemption report. A while after that both cards I was waiting on shipped out. That leaves me with only two outstanding redemptions, with one from Topps and one from Panini. The Topps card is a Frank Robinson # / 10 framed autograph from 2013 Topps Archives Baseball, and the Panini card is a Rookie Signatures autograph of Kawhi Leonard from 2012-13 Panini. I tried to get the Frank Robinson autograph substituted a couple of months ago, but I was told it was produced and would ship out 'soon.' The Leonard autograph was announced by Panini as being live a couple of weeks ago, but so far it hasn't shipped out.

The first card in the package from Topps was this Donald Cerrone base autograph from 2016 Topps UFC Knockout. When I saw that it was numbered # 42 / 49 I thought maybe they'd sent me a parallel or something, but the checklist just says that base autographs are numbered to # / 249 or less. It was a nice surprise to have the print run on this one be so low. In this picture Cerrone looks a lot like a guy in my National Guard unit. It makes me laugh a little because the guy I know always seems a little dazed, like he's been hit in the head a couple times too many.

This is the card I was really looking forward to receiving. It's a Dual Autographed Fight Mat Relic of Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber, also from 2016 Topps UFC Knockout. In the past these cards have been one-sided, with both fighters appearing on the same side of the card, but this year's cards stretch out a bit and give each fighter a whole side to themselves. This copy is numbered # 07 / 10. I should probably put it up on eBay, but I don't know yet if I'll be able to bring myself to do it. I'm kind of a Faber fan, although Cruz whupped his butt for five rounds last weekend in their third (and probably final) fight against each other last weekend. This is a pretty cool card. My only issues with it are that Cruz didn't manage to stay on the sticker with his autograph and there is a ding in the corner closest to Faber's head. Outside of that this is an awesome card and easily the best UFC card in my collection to date.

Seeking Redemption 17: Some Big Hits from 2016 Topps UFC Knockout

Although I am not as active as I was earlier in the year, I still participate in the UFC breaks over at Team Breaks. I did pick up a fair number of spots in late March and early April when they were breaking 2016 Topps UFC Knockout. I had a couple of decent hits for various fighter collections that I will show off eventually, but today I am showing a couple of redemption cards I picked up during that time frame.

The first one is a base autograph of Donald Cerrone. I think I actually grabbed the Donald Cerrone spot in a Pick Your Fighter break. I don't necessarily collect Cerrone cards, but I think in that particular set of breaks the fighters I usually buy were taken and I took a chance on a few spots for fighters who seemed to have a lot of hits in the product. I happened to get lucky in this case and get a Cerrone autograph.

The other card here is a pretty big hit. It's a Dominick Cruz / Urijah Faber Dual Autographed Fight Mat Relic card. I think these are serially-numbered to # / 10, so they're a pretty rare hit. I believe I got this one from a Random Weight Class break. When it was pulled back in early April there were a couple on eBay that I think went in the $50-60 range. Another copy sold a couple of days ago for around $110. I still haven't decided if I will keep it once I receive the card. I kind of follow Urijah Faber, but I also wouldn't say no to $110. That's half a master set of Heritage baseball.

Both of these cards were reported as live in the latest Topps redemption update, so I am hoping it won't be too long before they are marked as shipped. I bumped them up in the posting queue to make sure I got this post up before I received the actual cards in the mail. I'm still waiting on a Frank Robinson autograph from 2013 Topps Archives Baseball. During my last exchange with Topps Customer Service they told me that card was produced and should ship soon, but I haven't seen any updates confirming that. I know there have been a few redemption updates announcing that other Frank Robinson autographs are live, but maybe mine is taking a while because it's an on-card signature which then has to be mounted in a frame. Anyway, I am looking forward to getting these redemptions filled soon.