2009 ALLEN & GINTER PRE-SELL CHECKLIST REVIEW - The Boring ‘ol Base Cards

Note - this is the first in about 8 zillion Allen & Ginter posts upcoming in the next month or so. First I will be reviewing the pre-sell checklist. You can download it (and the sell sheet) from this site here. Pre-sell information should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Nobody wants to know about the base cards, right? I mean, base cards are for chumps, all we’re really interested in is the SUPA MOJO HITZ! Feh, base cards, who needs ‘em! Give me a pack of 2 MegaPremiumTripleAutoPressPlatePatch cards that costs $500 a throw and I’m a happy guy! So, no Allen & Ginter post today… I’ll save it for the GOOD STUFF like Rip Cards and DNA strands and AutoRelics. So… bye y’all! See you tomorrow!

…

Ok, is it safe? Are all the Joe Collector schmucks gone? Can I talk about the base cards now? Great!

Ok, so this is the base design, taken straight from the sell sheet:

As you can see the design is much different from the A&G design from the past few years. In this instance, change is definitely good. The A&G design was virtually identical in 2006 and 2007 and was tweaked slightly in 2008. It’s a good design and they mimicked the originals perfectly, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice to have a border and a little less white space for a change. The design is also based on an original A&G card (or cards, actually) and in my humble opinion is pretty darned good looking. The basics are still there, a photo manipulated to look more like a lithograph with a cloudy pastel background, just now inside a little frame. At the very least it fixes the problem of some cards having a tiny little picture floating inside a large expanse of white that plagued the last couple of sets. Beckett showed off a horizontally formatted Jimmy Rollins card on their box break and it looked very nice, something I was worried about with the bulky name and logo at the bottom of the card.

So the design is good, what about the checklist? According to the sell sheet it is broken down thusly:
230 Veterans
30 Rookies
25 Historic Figures
And um, some World Champions

That obviously doesn’t exactly add up to 350 so I sorted the checklist by the type and got 24 Champions, 25 Historical Figures, 36 Rookies and 263 Veterans. That doesn’t add up to 350 either as cards 24 and 228 are missing from the pre-sell checklist. Who knows what the heck they are. I told you these checklists are unreliable. Maybe that phantom Mayo Joe Paterno card will show up here.

So what is actually in that unreliable checklist? Well, veteran cards are pretty much what you’d expect. Here are the Braves I found to give you a feel of how deep into the roster this set might go:
Derek Lowe
Nate McLouth (maybe a Pirate)
Yunel Escobar
Javier Vazquez
Jair Jurrjens
Brian McCann
Tim Hudson
Casey Kotchman
Jeff Francoeur
Chipper Jones

So most of the starters, basically. No Kelly Johnson, no Garrett Anderson, neither closer. But there should be a rookie or two in there maybe… I’m looking at YOU Jordan Schafer and Tommy Hanson! There’s no way of telling though as this is the rookie checklist:
Gaby Sanchez
Will Venable
Travis Snider
David Price
Dexter Fowler
A whoooole lotta TBDs

Hanson’s been up a month. That’s enough time to squeeze him in the set, right Topps? RIGHT??? If he’s not in there, he’ll have to be created at any rate.

Now for the Champions. Topps digs deep for Champions to include in this set. Sure, there’s Michael Phelps, but the rest (except for one that I’ll talk about in another post) are, let’s say more obscure. Mariel Zagunis. Anna Tunnicliffe. Jason Wong. Clyde Paris. Herb Simpson. I’ll figure out who these people are once I open the product. There’s quite a few TBDs in there too so there’s surprises galore in this set.

The Historic Figures is another subset where Topps plays fast and loose when defining ‘figures’. There’s a few figures that aren’t actually humans like the Alamo and The Suez Canal. As for the people, here are my top 5 ‘I want those cards”:
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Geronimo
Doc Holliday (I’m your huckleberry)
Heinrich Hertz
Vincent Van Gogh

Those aren’t the coolest ones though. There’s a card of the Milky Way that looks frickin’ sweet and the #1 card I want out of this set:

ELECTRON

Some people think a trading card of an electron is stupid. Why would ANYONE want a card of a stupid electron they say.

BECAUSE WITHOUT ELECTRONS YOU WOULDN’T BE READING THIS YOU DOPE!

There is one more thing I am compelled to mention before I close out this post. Hey Mario! Guess who is in this set?

I’ve got the bubble mailer addressed and stamped already in anticipation of being the first to send Mario the latest addition to his Miller collection.

Up next: The mini cards.