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.

Star Wars Masterwork Scum and Villainy Set + Contest Reminder!

Just a reminder that I am holding a contest for a complete base set of 2015 BBM True Heart wrestling cards and a couple of autographs from that same set! You don't even have to read the whole (really long) post to enter! It just takes a comment. As I write this, there are only two entries. The deadline to enter is this Saturday!

Here is something I picked up a long long time ago, probably soon after the Star Wars Masterwork set was released. It is a 10-card insert set entitled Scum and Villainy, and features some of the great lower-level villains from the movie series. It also features some of the not-as-great villains, but not everyone can be Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt. Boba Fett is the headliner for this set, taking the #1 spot in the checklist. He always has been kind of a cool guy. The inserts are pretty simple in format. The front features a photo of the villain, and the back features a cropped version of the villain and a short bio.

Jabba is a pretty dastardly fella, but he eventually meets his doom at the hands of Princess Leia, who chokes him to death with the chain he is using to keep her captive. I've got a couple of LEGO sets featuring Jabba and his retinue that rank right up there as some of my favorites.

Greedo is a low-level thug who winds up getting shot by Han Solo. For some reason there is a lot of debate over whether Han Solo or Greedo fired first during their encounter at the cantina. I think it is obvious that Han Solo preemptively shot Greedo. Without some of the Sith villains to pad this checklist out, we are rapidly running out of real meaningful villains. Jango Fett is a pretty big deal in that the whole army of Clone Troopers is based on his DNA, but I didn't find his character all that compelling. General Grievous is kind of cool, but doesn't really stick around for very long.

I thought that Ponda Baba died in the cantina scene, but according to the Wookieepdia, he recovered (partially) and went on to have quite a few wild adventures. One cool thing about the Star Wars universe is that pretty much every character with any screen time at all has a fleshed-out story telling where they came from and where they go in between and after the films. In spite of the relatively lackluster checklist, this is a pretty neat insert set. It looks pretty good and it's good to see the villains outside of the galaxy-level bad guys get a little bit of the spotlight.

Star Wars Masterwork Artist Return Sketch Card - Princess Leia by Mary Bellamy

When the Star Wars Masterwork set was released I set out to look for a few decent sketch cards for my collection. I pulled a couple of sketches from the box I opened and I purchased one sketch from eBay. One artist whose sketches interested me was Mary Bellamy. I had exchanged messages with her on the Blowout Cards forums and purchased/commissioned some stuff from her.

When companies do a product with sketch cards, they often give the artists a handful of cards to do sketches on and sell on their own. Sometimes the cards look the same as the pack-pulled sketch cards and sometimes they have an 'Artist's Proof' or 'Artist Return' stamp on them. I believe these cards make up a large portion of an artist's income from a set. I saw some of Bellamy's Star Wars Masterwork Artist Returns cards in the video she did to show off her cards from the set and inquired about one of the Princess Leia sketches she had done. She told me that Topps had kept them and she was having a little trouble getting them back, but that she would reserve one if Topps sent anything back to her. 

Eventually Topps got some of her cards back to her and I was able to get this one to add to my collection, an illustration of Leia in her hooded white dress. I like the colors that Bellamy uses, and her style is cartoony without being too simple. I'm not sure I remember that wallpaper in the background from the movies, though, but perhaps this is from some off-screen scene where Leia visits her grandmother's house.

Here is the back of the card. I can't find any markings on this card to differentiate it from the pack-pulled sketches, so in this case it looks like Topps didn't do anything special to mark the Artist Returns. Eventually I need to get around to showing the other sketches I got from Mary Bellamy, but that's not going to happen today.

Star Wars Masterwork Imperial Shield Bunker Relic

Here's another type of insert that can be found in the recent high-end Star Wars Masterwork release from Topps. These are relic cards containing pieces of the shield generator bunker on Endor in Return of the Jedi. I believe there are Frame relics and Panel relics. The cards feature various characters from the film alongside the relic piece. I picked up the Princess Leia Organa variation, serially-numbered # 022 / 155.

Relic cards featuring pieces of props from the movies aren't a new thing, as previous releases have included cards with fur from Wookiee and Ewok costumes as well as bits of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge. Bunker pieces are a new thing, though, and I think it's a pretty cool idea. I'm glad I was able to pick up one of these for my Masterwork collection.

Star Wars Masterwork Luke Skywalker Stamp Relic

One type of card that I didn't pull from the box of Star Wars Masterwork that I opened recently was a Stamp Relic card, which basically is one of the Star Wars stamps released by the USPS in 2007 mounted in a little frame. I decided I needed to pick one up as a part of my Star Wars Masterwork 'type' set in which I do not try to get every card, but I grab the most common sets and supplement the collection with cards from some of the harder-to-find inserts. I wound up getting the Luke Skywalker Stamp Relic card, numbered # 63 / 99.

The back of the card is pretty simple, with a picture of Luke Skywalker, the Star Wars Masterwork logo, and the standard congratulatory message that comes along with any Topps relic card.

Star Wars Masterwork Princess Leia Sketch by Karen Hallion

I like Star Wars a lot, and if I were pressed to choose a favorite character I'd probably go with Princess Leia. C-3PO and R2-D2 would be up there, and Jabba the Hutt is probably the character I quote the most, but Leia is my favorite. The problem with that is that pretty much everything Leia-related carries a premium price tag. I've been watching eBay auctions for Leia sketch cards from the recently-released Star Wars Masterwork set to see if I could land a good deal one that ended at a weird time or got posted with a (relatively) low Buy It Now price.

After a whole pile of misses, I finally landed this piece by artist Karen Hallion. It was a little pricey, but the Buy It Now price was between 50% and 65% of the ending auction prices on her two other Leia sketch cards from the set that have surfaced on eBay so far. I will take that any day of the week.

This is my second Leia sketch card, with the other one by artist Chris Henderson coming from the Star Wars Galaxy set. I haven't shown off all of my cards from the Star Wars Masterwork set yet, but with this sketch card I am probably about done with the product. I considered trying to put together the 25 short-printed base cards, but there just aren't many of them to go around and the prices keep going higher. I put in bids on a bunch of them from the same seller once, but the bids soon went way above my pain threshold and I was tapping out like Cat Zingano against Ronda Rousey the other day.

Pack of the Day 90: Topps Star Wars Masterwork Box Break: Pack 4 (of 4)

Here is the fourth and final pack of my box of Star Wars Masterwork trading cards, featuring five cards from Topps' super-premium Star Wars offering. So far the pulls have been decent but not spectacular, and while it's not the worst break of this stuff I've seen, it certainly hasn't blown me away with awesomeness. Let's see what Pack 4 does to that perception.

The base cards start things out well enough, with two of the more popular characters in the Star Wars canon, premiere bounty hunter Boba Fett and the swashbuckling smuggler / reluctant hero Han Solo. These are decent pulls, I suppose.

Next up is a Blue parallel of Wicket W. Warrick, one of the named Ewoks in the films. I've never really liked the Ewoks, but some people think they are cool / cute. I think they are creepy and their battle scenes make me think that the Empire should have put a little more effort into recruiting Stormtroopers.

Next up is a base Companions insert of Jango and Boba Fett. I like the daring choice to go with a purple border on this set. I could think of pairs from the films that I like more than Jango and Boba, but someone has to play the role of checklist-filler. With four cards out of the way, there's only one card left in the box, and it's...

 ...an okay but not great sketch of a Stormtrooper by Davide Fabbri, who did a buttload of variations on this sketch for the set. So the market is flooded with Sandtroopers, Snowtroopers, Scout Troopers, and Stormtroopers in approximately this same pose. Oh well, at least it's a sketch. Most of the boxes in this product carry two sketches, so this didn't really come as a surprise to me.

Fabbri didn't sign the backs of his cards, so the Artist Signature block on the card is blank. And with that, my box break of Star Wars Masterwork reaches its conclusion. How do I feel? I did better than I could have, but overall the box was decidedly ordinary and didn't quite live up to the price tag. I probably got more value out of the anticipation and daydreaming I did while waiting for the box to get to my mailbox. I'll be able to recoup some of the money I spent by selling a few items I pulled, and maybe that will be enough to fill out a couple of the insert sets and get representative items from some of the relic sets. That way I can build a mini-master set of sorts. I'd love to build the full base set, but those short-printed cards are tough to find, and they carry a premium.

Pack of the Day 89: Topps Star Wars Masterwork Box Break: Pack 3 (of 4)

Here is Pack 3 of the Star Wars Masterwork box I opened. We are past the halfway point on the box now, having pulled a Luke Skywalker manu-relic and a Lee Lightfoot painted sketch card as the hits in the first two packs.

The two base cards in the pack are Sy Snootles, lead singer for Jabba's house band, and Captain Piett, who was promoted to Admiral after watching Darth Vader Force choke his predecessor to death for incompetence and later died in a space battle.

The 4-LOM card is a Blue parallel. The Blue cards are not serially-numbered and can easily be mistaken for base cards. The Tusken Raider is from the insert set Scum and Villainy, which highlights villains from the Star Wars universe. Like the other basic inserts in the product, this is a 10-card set.

And here is the hit for the box, a base autograph of Tim Rose as Admiral Ackbar. Being a base autograph of a middle-tier character makes this sort of a low-end hit. Ackbar is one of my personal favorite characters though, so if I wasn't going to pull a Carrie Fisher or Harrison Ford autograph this would be the one for me to get. With the promised autograph and sketch card out of the way, this box is pretty darn average. I like the cards well enough and I'm glad to pull an Ackbar PC hit, but nothing has blown me off my feet and so far I haven't seen any of the rarer parallels or variations, like acetate, wood, or metal-framed cards.

Pack of the Day 88: Topps Star Wars Masterwork Box Break: Pack 2 (of 4)

Here I am with Pack 2 of the box of Topps Star Wars Masterwork that I opened up. Again, each box has four packs and each pack has five cards, with one card in each pack being a hit (sketch, manu-relic, autograph, real relic).

Since I got the SP for the box in the first pack, the rest of the base cards from here on out are of the regular variety. This pack yielded the heroic Obi-Wan Kenobi and the villainous Count Dooku.

The Chief Chirpa is a Green Metallic parallel, numbered # 27 / 50. It's got a green background, holographic foil, and the textured accents around the edges are a bit different than on the base cards. The card on the right is a Defining Moments insert of Darth Vader. This set is a 10-card set featuring key moments in different characters' lives. The back of the card discusses the moment when Darth Vader turns against the Dark Side and throws the Emperor to his death in order to protect Luke.

The final card in the pack is the sketch card, a miniature painting by artist Lee Lightfoot featuring Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan in the foreground and R2-D2 in the background. You kind of have to view the card at a distance in order to get the effect of the painting.I'm still not 100% sure what all the other noise in the background is. Maybe if I had watched the movies more recently I would recognize the scene. Given what I have seen pulled out of boxes this is probably an above-average sketch card, but not quite in the top tiers when it comes to sketches in the set.

edit: Corky from the blog Pack War has informed me in the comments exactly where this scene fits into the films. He says, "The sketch card, which is quite awesome, comes from a scene in Return of the Jedi when Luke returns to Dagobah right before Yoda dies. When he leaves Yoda's home he walks around his X-Wing (which is in the background of the sketch card with R2-D2) and he sees Obi-Wan's ghost who goes on to explain why he didn't tell Luke that Vader was Anakin Skywalker." I thought the scene was on Dagobah, but I couldn't remember a time when Obi-Wan had visited Dagobah. It turns out it was his ghost. Thanks, Corky!

Topps provided a signature block on the back for artists to sign their work. Some artists used the space, some artists didn't, and many of the signatures are still unreadable. I looked at a ton of breaks of this product, so I was familiar with Lightfoot's style and could make out the signature. I do wish that artists in these sketch card sets would print their names on the cards somewhere, though. It would make things easier.

And that's it for Pack 2 of the box. I'll probably post the last two packs fairly soon. So far the box shows a little promise, but it hasn't been eye-poppingly spectacular.

Pack of the Day 87: Topps Star Wars Masterwork Box Break: Pack 1 (of 4)

Yesterday morning I spent my time jumping up from my chair every few minutes because I thought maybe I'd heard the mail truck down the street. I knew that my box of Star Wars Masterwork was due to arrive, and I was anxious to get into it. The mail truck finally arrived and dropped off my prize.

I took a couple pictures of the box, but the pictures are crappy. There is a light hanging above the table where my computer sits, and it creates a big spot on any pictures I try to take here. I should really do something about it, but I take pictures so infrequently that I am not super motivated to create a light box or something for taking photos that look decent.

 And here's the open box with all four packs still in it, unopened. This is honestly probably the best part of most breaks, when the packs are there in front of you and anything could be inside. Most breaks go downhill from that point, as the $ and PC cards slowly get eliminated and you realize your box hit is a sticker auto of a guy who got relegated to the D-League and washed out having played about 35 minutes of total professional ball. I figure I'll stretch these posts out pack by pack, starting from left to right in the box. I was going to do the whole deal, with pictures of each pack, but my kids started demanding food and I got tired of taking pictures, so I just ripped into the thing. There are four packs per box, with five cards per pack.

Starting Pack 1 off is two base cards. Owen Lars is a regular base card, and Sebulba is a short-printed base card. The set is 75 cards, with 1-50 being regular and 51-75 being seeded at one per box, or about a 7:1 ratio. That makes the SP cards pretty rare and pretty expensive on the secondary market. I ordered a 1-50 base set from a reseller. I don't know if I have it in me to chase the short-printed cards.

This Salacious Crumb card is a parallel. The literature says it is a Silver-Foil Parallel, but the foil on these is gold in color. I can't even handle that crap, so I am calling it a Gold parallel. Salacious Crumb is a mean little sucker. Look at him. This card is numbered on the back, # 91 / 99.

Finally, these are the two inserts from the pack. The first is a Canvas Parallel from the Companions insert set, featuring Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. This insert consists of ten cards and features various pairings of folks in the movies who are associated with each other. It's got a bunch of parallels, with the Canvas being middle of the road as far as rarity. This one is numbered # 55 / 99.

The other insert is a manu-relic featuring Luke Skywalker's Lightsaber. I am not sure exactly what is going on with these cards, but they claim to honor the heritage of various weapons from the Star Wars universe. The example I pulled appears to be the most common Bronze variation, and is numbered # 073 / 129. I think they should have used this photo for it, with Luke gunning for a Darwin award by staring into the business end of the weapon:

"Undeniable potential in the Force, but needs to work on impulse control. Reminiscent in some ways of one of my former pupils." - excerpt from Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi Scouting Report on prospect Luke Skywalker

 And that's it for Pack 1. It's a decent start, and we still haven't seen any sketch cards or autographs. What will Pack 2 contain?