Topps Heroes

[rowancv]

hey everyone! yupp, i'm new here, but its good to find people who are actually excited about heroes trading cards! all the other forums ive seen are quite dead.. anyway, speaking of sketch cards- the prices are bananas! i have to admit, i never thought they could get as high as they are going now, especially for specific artists. i purchased 2 sketch cards, both incoming- one by russell walks and another by brian kong. i absolutely LOVE them. i need to get my hands on a tim sale sketch though.. that's gonna be real tough. staggs sketch cards are really up there as well.. i'll be checkin' in from time to time. i recognized a few usernames i've bought from on eBay, so that's pretty cool :-)

[merkin]

Character and Artist???


OK, OK... its a JOKE....

[newengland4me]

This might have been posted before but found it very helpful when looking for Heroes sketch cards on ebay

Heroes Sketch Cards
A list of current Topps Heroes Artist Sketch Card and related auctions

SketchCards.com: Heroes Artist Sketch Cards!


enjoy Peter newengland4me

[hockeyjunkie99]

Merkin,

I would say that my unborn baby drew that one.....LOL

[rowancv]

yatta!



+the base & foil sets

a few are still incoming but i couldnt wait to post them :-D ..a few people that i've bought some of these are members on here, so big thanks and shoutout to them!

i love Heroes!

(got Sale, Walks, and Kong sketch cards too.. my pursuit continues with these sketch cards)

God bless ya'll~

-Ro

[Incarnadine]

Okay, here are my final thoughts on Heroes and how TOPPS handled the first card set.

TOPPS marketed this as a "limited" release. While we know "limited" means something different to the giant companies like TOPPS and UD than for companies like Rittenhouse and Inkworks 20000+ boxes is not limited. There were about 20000 boxes (hobby) of Star Wars 30th which is one of their flagship non sports releases with a huge long term fan base and celebrating an anniversary while Heroes is a fledgeling set with a big, but new, fan base and having a similar print run is just bad business. Sure TOPPS got the big sales from this set but they might have hurt sales of their next Heroes releases because the trust is gone. If this had been a 10000-12000 box run with

the odds for sketches and costume cards reversed this set could have been a monster and interest would have been high for the next set. As it is almost nobody is really happy and some people are downright disgusted. The good to fantastic sketches seem to be selling fairly well now (the junk, well, junk rarely sells well in any set, except maybe Star Wars), the problem is with an average of 2 sketches per case the odds of getting good (or better than good) sketches are slim, had the odds for sketches and costumes been reversed the chances of good sketches is much larger and the costumes would have gotten better prices making many more people happy.

There are problems with the randomness of the big pulls too, after less than 1 box from a case I could pinpoint exactly which pack from the other 7 boxes had the big pull in it. I don't think sealed cases will dip below $300 too far, the chance at good autos and higher end sketches are still there, just not in numbers that would drive the cases up. I do think box prices might fall though. I've heard several people say they don't trust individual boxes on ebay now because knowing half of every case has mostly worthless costume cards they feel if someone opened a case and hit sketches and autos in the forst 2 or 3 boxes that the rest might just get sold because chances are almost all of them will have costume cards, it's kind of like cherry picking cases.

I was really excited about this set, which is why I scrounged around for every bit of info I could find in the months leading up to the release but TOPPS has muted my excitement somewhat, the lengthy delays leading up to the release which turns out to not be "limited" afterall then finding they used costume cards to fill out half of each case on average with 2 out of every 4 costume cards being a Parkman. My first case was fairly good and my second will probably arrive tomorrow but that is it for me for boxes. I'll still be chasing sketches on feebay, there is still great stuff but I'll let others risk opening boxes which is a big difference between this set and others I like. For example, I still buy the occasional box of The Complete Avengers even though they are around $110 now and I plan to get a few more DC Legacy and Marvel Masterpieces, all these gave good value on average (individual boxes can still suck but that's the risk with any box).

I'm not sure what to do with future Heroes sets (supposedly TOPPS has 2 more in the works), I may cut back to a single cases and take a wait and see approach before getting more. TOPPS has a pesky habit in non-sports of following a disappointing set with a great set, and vice-versa.

[hockeyron]

Incarnadine I think you're right in just about everything you say ...

Now I was fortunate -- I ordered 3 cases day 1 from my long-time non sports distributor and got in at less than $ 300 a case .... got 3 autos in the 1 case I opened including Hayden and sold the other 2 cases (but after they started free falling ) and ended up with a decent profit which considering the fall in case/box prices and the bad job Topps did I'll gladly take ....
However I think Topps has really hurt itself for Series 2 sales .... I really figured it would be 1-2 costumes , 3-4 sketches and 2-3 autos per case and if Topps had done that like you said this stuff would have been really hot and stayed hot up to and thru release ..... but they stiffed us and no product that in most cases has 4 costume cards with only 5 in the set is going to fly ... now if it was a Harry Potter product with 15 costume cards in the set , all serial numbered and all of varying production numbers then it would have been different but not when you know you're gonna hit 1-3 Parkman costume cards in pretty much every case ..... you're simply not gonna drive interest when you only have 5 regular costume cards in the set and you get one roughly every other box ..... and yes like you said it hurt individual box sales as well ....
Very, very disappointed in Topps on this one and I think they screwed what could have been a very good release and a very good line with a bad 1st job ..... seems to me like they should have made this a great line just so they could sell Series 2 , which they probably would have screwed up on LOL ...

Hopefully they'll see some of these complaints and do a much better job on Indiana Jones Heritage but with another Indy set for the upcoming movie you wonder if they are'nt already starting to screw with this series ....

I know once the pre-sell for Series 2 Heroes comes out that right now I'm gonna pass on it unless Topps announces something spectacular and then can you even trust them to do what they say ??

ron

[Tim]

Agree 100% with both of you, and have a couple additions.

1.) This is no different from the sports cards Topps puts out. I made the comment in another thread about how Topps is the most greedy company around, as they destroyed both Bowman Draft and Bowman Sterling baseball by mass producing both in record and ridiculous quantities. They did the same thing with Heroes. Sad.
2.) You alluded to this, but make no mistake: if you got in early at the right price, this was at least a break-even product. The higher prices, based on the lies from Topps about content, led to us taking a bath on the product.

[NonSportsCardForum]

From various discussions Ive had on this set, I wont place total blame on Topps.

NBC was a bitch to deal with and from what Ive been told, by people I totally trust, it took alot of hard work to get the costumes as it was, especially with the autographs.

However on the flip side its safe to say the actors didnt sign as willingly because Topps wasnt paying much.

Ever since I saw a few of the first case breaks I knew I wasnt going to get a case. I totally expected the costumes to be short printed over the sketch cards. Regardless of how many sketch cards we got per case, they would remain at the same secondary values. What hurts the sketch cards are the artists that were asked for more and didnt have the time to give each one its own individual attn and thus created a ton of replication.

If they had made the costumes 1 per case, we would have great values on them vs under 10.00 a pop. To some collectors thats a good thing because they can get the costumes for less than the price of a box.

As far as the missing autograph. Its 50/50 blame. The actor must have decided not to and Topps should have said something when his auto didnt make it for pack insertion. It took buying collectors to figure out his auto wasnt gonna happen.

[jedipencil]

Hello everyone....I'm new here....and did some cards for this set, and from what I know, much of what NonSportsCardForum says is true enough...I can tell you the art director worked very hard to provide a good set. My first cards have more time put into them than the extras, but we all did our best to do a good job...