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Permalink Reply by Steel on April 2, 2014 at 5:43am

One important thing to remember when buying a box of cards, is there are "retail" boxes (like the one you've shown above) and "hobby" boxes.  Hobby boxes you can get at local card or memorabilia stores or online from many different places.  Retail boxes can be found at places like Target or Walmart.  The hobby boxes are more expensive but they guarantee you a certain "hit."  If you buy a hobby box of the version you pictured above, you are guaranteed to either get one autograph or one "relic" per box.  A relic either has a small swatch of uniform or a piece of a bat.  The "retail" versions of these boxes have no such guarantee.  Here are some examples of relic cards from this set:

 The Pedroia is a bat card and the McCutchen is a jersey card:

And here is a example of an autograph from this set:

And here is a card with both an autograph and relic:

If you're interested in buying boxes to "make money" hoping to get a big hit, it rarely rarely pays off.  Again, you are guaranteed to only get one of these types of cards in a box, and usually you will not get a huge star.  You could get lucky and get a card like the Cabrera above that you could sell for more than what you'd pay for the box, but again, it's rare.  If you would just like to collect and keep some of the cards for the set, it is much more cost effective to just buy the individual cards you like from ebay, rather than buying a box and hoping to get lucky.

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Permalink Reply by Null on April 2, 2014 at 9:27am

I've switched from autograph to card collecting of late, and Steel is correct, there are "Hobby" and "Retail" boxes. Usually the "Hobby" boxes have bigger/more hits per box (And a guaranteed "hit"). The ones you posted above are "retail" packs which have less hits and no guarantees to pull an auto/relic. The 2014 Topps Heritage have only 1 hit per hobby box if I recall correctly. I've cracked about 20 packs of these and was not impressed.  

Over the past year I have probably opened 10 hobby boxes worth of cards and my "best" autograph was a Wil Meyers prizm auto. 99% of the time you get no-name autos that I've literally sold for $3-$5.... 

You have a better chance of making money off of a rare insert/refractor/parallel than you do getting a big-name auto. 

But I collect cards to collect cards, not to make profit. And I enjoy ripping through packs looking for a big surprise!

The main cards sought after are typically Bowman Chrome, Topps Chrome, Allen & Ginter, Gypsy Queen. 

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