The Ultimate Ginter Full-Sized Insert Set Bracket!: Seeding Vote #6 (2011)

For the first part of the bracket creation, we need to seed the various full-sized insert sets.  I thought it'd be fun to first have a vote for the best insert set within each year and use each year vote winner as a top seed.  From there, I'll fill in the rest of the bracket with the remaining full-sized sets.

I also hope that each of these Seeding Vote posts give you a bit of information about each of the insert sets for a specific year.  That should help with your voting as we move forward into the heart of the Ultimate Ginter Full-Sized Insert Set Bracket.  I laid out the rest of the ground rules in my introductory post so feel free to check that post out as well.  Now, we move on to the good stuff (and remember to vote at the bottom of the post by leaving a comment with your choice)!

Today, we turn our attention to the 2011 Topps Allen & Ginter set and it's full-sized inserts.  2011 is a watershed moment for the Ginter brand in that this particular year brought a bunch of different full-sized inserts for collectors to chase.  Topps definitely mixed things up, though the results of that mix-up will definitely vary depending on your personal tastes in cardboard designs!  Let's get to it!

The first insert from 2011 should look familiar to anyone who has been following along with this series of posts, that's right, Baseball Highlight Sketches are back!  

Editor's Note:  I must thank COMC for the images as I didn't have the time/energy to dig out my binder and scan the various inserts today!

The 2011 edition featured a 25-card set of sketches and it's basically the same thing as the previous few years, albeit with a different checklist.  Speaking of the checklist, here's the full set:

• BHS-1 Minnesota Twins
• BHS-2 Jay Bruce
• BHS-3 Starlin Castro
• BHS-4 Roy Halladay
• BHS-5 Albert Pujols
• BHS-6 Jose Bautista
• BHS-7 CC Sabathia
• BHS-8 Cody Ross
• BHS-9 Edwin Jackson
• BHS-10 Ryan Howard
• BHS-11 Trevor Hoffman
• BHS-12 Armando Galarraga
• BHS-13 San Francisco Giants
• BHS-14 Mariano Rivera
• BHS-15 Aroldis Chapman
• BHS-16 Dallas Braden
• BHS-17 Texas Rangers
• BHS-18 Stephen Strasburg
• BHS-19 Matt Garza
• BHS-20 Alex Rodriguez
• BHS-21 David Wright
• BHS-22 Ubaldo Jimenez
• BHS-23 Mark Teixeira
• BHS-24 Jason Heyward
• BHS-25 Ichiro

Next up is the largest full-sized set, the 100-card Hometown Heroes set.  

This set's gimmick is that it takes a player and then discusses that player's hometown on the back of the card.  This is a fun twist in that the focus of the card is more on the town rather than the player itself.    

In previous years of Ginter, that'd be it for full-sized inserts but Topps wasn't content to stick to only two inserts by the time 2011 rolled around.  As proof, the next set is another large set (40 cards) and it's called The Minds that Made the Future.

This is a set that celebrates inventors and the like with a fun design.  The checklist is incredibly varied in both scope and time frame as you can see below.  Only in Ginter can you find cards of Ben Franklin, John Deere, and Euclid in the same set (and have it all make some sort of sense)!  

Full checklist:

• MMF1 Leonardo da Vinci
• MMF2 Alexander G. Bell
• MMF3 Eli Whitney
• MMF4 Nicolaus Copernicus
• MMF5 Johannes Gutenberg
• MMF6 George W. Carver
• MMF7 Samuel Morse
• MMF8 Granville Woods
• MMF9 Elisha Otis
• MMF10 Alessandro Volta
• MMF11 Tycho Brahe
• MMF12 Gregor Mendel
• MMF13 Carl Linnaeus
• MMF14 Johannus Kepler
• MMF15 Isaac Newton
• MMF16 Marie Curie
• MMF17 Carl Friedrich Gauss
• MMF18 Sigmund Freud
• MMF19 Bernhard Riemann
• MMF20 Leonhard Euler
• MMF21 Robert Fulton
• MMF22 Ada Lovelace
• MMF23 Florence Nightingale
• MMF24 Nikola Tesla
• MMF25 Galileo Galilei
• MMF26 Charles Darwin
• MMF27 Louis Pasteur
• MMF28 Guglielmo Maoni
• MMF29 AntoineLavoisier
• MMF30 Michael Faraday
• MMF31 Dmitri Mendeleev
• MMF32 Robert Koch
• MMF33 Euclid
• MMF34 Ahimedes
• MMF35 Jagadish Chandra Bose
• MMF36 Aristotle
• MMF37 John Deere
• MMF38 George Eastman
• MMF39 Samuel Colt
• MMF40 Benjamin Franklin

Next, a rather unusual set called Ascent of Man.  This 30-card set is actually a single diorama if you lay each card side-by-side you can see the "ascent of man" from Prokayotes all the way to Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  

I remember the borderless design being quite jarring when pulled from a pack of 2011 Ginter, but the set itself is certainly novel.  As host of the Ultimate Ginter Full Size Set Bracket, I'm rather curious to see what the reaction will be to some of the more offbeat sets (such as this one).

Finally, we end with a 20-card set called Floating Fortresses.

This set celebrates warships of all shapes and sizes from a variety of navies around the world.  

And that does it for the 2011 set.  For the first time in the series, I expect people will have a much harder choice in casting their vote!  To summarize, you choices are:

• Baseball Highlight Sketches
• Hometown Heroes
• The Minds that Made the Future
• Ascent of Man
• Floating Fortresses

Cast your vote in the comments below!