Happy Topps Day!!!

For the last few years I have been calling the day where Topps Series 1 Flagship is released as Topps Day, it is my own personal holiday.  Today, in addition to being Topps Day, was also College Football National Signing Day and my USC Trojans finished strong with a top 5 recruiting class.  Armed with the exciting football news, I had a fairly high level of confidence that a stop after work at my local Target would yield some Series 1 and I was lucky enough to find:

I already preordered a base set and 5 of the insert sets from a case breaker on eBay but my excitement over the new release still drove me to buy one of each - retail pack, value pack, hanger box and blaster.  That's a lot of Kris Bryant to take in!

I always like to celebrate my first card and this year it was a pretty solid card:

A nice card of one of the top rookies with both a rookie logo and rookie cup.  I have to say I wasn't so sure about the design but seeing it in hand, I am okay with it.  Seems kind of Upper Deckish to me but it has all the necessary info - team logo, position, player name and team name - on the front and lots of room for a decent photo.  By the way, the first thing I opened was the retail pack in case anyone was wondering.

Also need to celebrate my first Giant, none other than ace Madison Bumgarner:

There seem to be quite a few horizontal cards in what I opened and I am okay with that.

Here are all the Giants base I pulled:

 Decided to show the back of MadBum since you saw him above.  I am probably not the only one who wasn't surprised that Bumgarner isn't on any social media sites.

I was also lucky enough to pull these:

The Posey card looks sweet and makes up for him not appearing on the Series 1 checklist.  I was super ecstatic to pull the Bumgarner manurelic from my blaster, I never get lucky enough to pull cards of the Giants like that.

In the base set, the checklist cards have cool combo cards on the front - one of my favorite features of this set.

 From my perspective these 2 cards tie for the dumbest thing about this set.  Woo Hoo I pulled a 1987 card of a common player with blue letters saying Rediscover Topps stamped on it.  Well Topps, I have been collecting since 1979, have 3 sets of 1987 Topps sitting around along with about 3 boxes of dups, I don't need to rediscover Topps and I don't need another 1987 card.  I am also not a fan of these Bowman cards.  I actually was pretty impressed with the design until I saw the Bowman logo in the corner.  I need to be somewhat accepting as I will be getting the entire insert set with my Master Set purchase.

I want to end on a positive note, it is Topps Day! These are my two favorite insert sets and luckily both are coming my way in their entirety.  Yeah, I know I just blasted 1987 Topps but I actually do like the design and enjoy seeing different players with the design.  The 5 Tool cards are one of my favorite insert design in years.

You may have noticed that after a nice stretch of posting, I have been absent for a couple weeks.  We had a pretty nasty illness run through the ARPSmith household a couple weeks back that hit me, my wife and all 3 of my kids so the energy to knock out some posts just hasn't existed. However I am feeling better and nothing like a Happy Topps Day! to get me back posting.