I guess I am good news type of person, so we'll go with that first. The look of the product does not disappoint at all. The shine of the cards and the refractors are all amazing. The colors are 1000x better than last year. The card looks as though the player is coming out of a colored doorway going into the light. These color refractors seem to fall a little less than 1 per box.
The Atomic refractors fall 1 per mini box and they also look quite awesome. The autographed gold and red versions are even better.
The product itself looks amazing, but what topps did to allocation and content absolutely destroys this product.
So you go to the message boards and check out some box breaks. You will ALWAYS see how some guy bought a box and pulled an RG3 1/1 or some crazy auto. However in the case of finest I'd say this is seriously few and far between. After breaking 10 cases of this stuff, it left a bad taste in my mouth. It was so badly allocated that it seemed like it was super tough to pull anything of value. I went ahead and compiled some data from the cases so we can see how badly this product really is.
Before looking at this I suggest taking a look at this blog post by Field Level View which outlines how Topps stacked the odds against the collectors. http://www.fieldlevelview.com/?p=2529
In his article he shows how the base rookies are numbered so high, that the odds of getting someone of value is stacked against the collectors. There are upwards of 40,000 base rookies auto jerseys and patches. You can only imagine how hard it is to pull a Luck, Griffin or Richardson.
What I did was list every hit that I had in hand or scanned. I may have missed a couple so this data isn't perfect, but it mirrors exactly what Field Level View stated in his article. It shows the percentage of even getting a mid tier rookies.
| AJ Jenkins SP | 2 |
| Russell Wilson SP | 2 |
| Doug Martin SP | 3 |
| Devier Posey | 8 |
| Joe Adams | 8 |
| Stephen Hill SP | 3 |
| Brock Osweiler SP | 3 |
| Ronnie Hillman | 10 |
| Nick Toon | 7 |
| Bernard Pierce | 2 |
| Kendall Wright SP | 2 |
| Chris Givens | 9 |
| Jarius Wright | 13 |
| Michael Egnew | 12 |
| Robert Turbin | 6 |
| T.Y Hilton | 9 |
| Mohamed Sanu SP | 1 |
| T.J Graham | 7 |
| Matt Schaub | 1 |
| Isaiah Pead | 1 |
| Rueben Randle | 2 |
| Dwayne Allen | 7 |
| Brian Quick SP | 1 |
| Michael Floyd SP | 2 |
| Nick Foles SP | 3 |
| David Wilson SP | 1 |
| Justin Blackmon SP | 1 |
| Ryan Broyles | 10 |
| Coby Fleener | 8 |
| Alshon Jeffery SP | 3 |
| Torrey Smith | 1 |
| Lamar Miller | 1 |
| LaMichael James SP | 1 |
This is from roughly 10 cases +/- 10 hits.
These were the big hits that we got from 10 cases:
| Mohamed Sanu Gold Atomic Auto /25 |
| Triple Rams Auto GU /10 |
| Doug Martin Red Atomic Auto /10 |
| Colt McCoy Red Auto Jersey /25 |
| Trent Richardson auto patch /10 |
| Mark Ingram Auto jersey /10 |
| Michael Floyd Auto patch /10 |
| AJ Green Red Refractor Auto jersey /25 |
| Justin Blackmon Finest Moments |
| Kendall Wright Gold Atomic Auto /25 |
| Devier Posey Pulsar auto Patch /25 |
| Brock Osweiler Finest Moments Auto |
The spreadsheet shows how many of each hit was pulled. We were lucky to pull one of the big ones. However, The thing to take in from this is the mid tier rookies. They are very hard to pull! With names like Nick Foles, Kendall Wright, AJ Jenkins, Lamichael James, David Wilson and Mohamed Sanu (among others) coming out 1 per 10 cases drowns the value of this product out. For people who rip and flip, if you didn't generally hit something huge, you would end up clawing your way back to the threshold by getting the mid level guys. In finest, this is non existent. In the first 5 cases that we opened, we did not pull an autograph numbered to anything less than 25. The ones we did pull were duds. I really can't fathom why Topps would do this. It is either taking advantage of collectors because last year was so successful, or they are saving the big names for their big releases like Five Star, Chrome and whatever else they drum up this year. As mentioned before, there is always someone who gets extremely lucky, but for the most part people are taking it to the chin and it shows.
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