Box Review: 2024 Topps Archives Collector's Box (Lunch Box)

The 2024 Topps Archives set was released in early 2025 and I was able to grab both a Hobby box and a Collector's box to use for a recent group break over on my Discord.  

Since I'm not above "double-dipping," I now get to use that same Collector's lunch box for a review on the blog!

Let's start with tin itself, a lovely little tin complete with a handle and latch.  

The lunch box comes in a cardboard box so you won't know which of the four designs you'll get until you open up the outer box.  In our case, we got a Yankee-centric Aaron Judge lunchbox.  The blue color works well with the photos of the Judge cards.  The only improvement that I'd suggest Topps do next time is to put different photos on the front and the back of the tin, otherwise, this is a nice-looking (but small) lunch box!

Once you open up the lunch box, you are greeted with ten eight-card packs.  The outer box promises one autograph plus 4 exclusive purple parallels per box.  As it turned out, most of our box was base cards so let's begin with those.

The 300-card base set features three past Topps designs (1961, 1970, and 1994).  I've never quite figured out how Topps picks out its designs for the Archives brand, but I must admit that this year's selections aren't among my favorite Topps designs.  

Our box had the following:

• 23 cards in the 1961 design
• 23 cards in the 1970 design
• 24 cards in the 1994 design

You can't ask for a much better distribution than that!  I did go through the CMP codes on the back of the cards to see if we had any variations but we came up empty on that front.

As I mentioned at the top of the post, each Collector's tin promises four exclusive Purple parallels.  

The purple foil really shines nicely on the cards, though purple might not be the best border color choice for a team like the Brewers.  As a group break host, I would have liked to have seen all four purple parallels be of different teams but at least we got a nice Bryce Harper out of it!

Moving on to the inserts, our box produced a total of four regular inserts spread across four different sets.

Quite honestly, the designs of these sort of blend together - all of them are on foilboard and none of the designs have any particular nostalgic ties to me at least.  You'll notice another Brewer here as well (Churio rookie card).

While all of the above pulls are probably par for the course of an average tin, we did get one unexpected goodie:

That's an "At the Break" Green foilboard parallel.  According to Topps' website, the odds of finding one of those in a Collector's tin is 1:1,954 packs!!  The card is serially numbered out of 99 on the reverse.  That's definitely a nice pull for the Cardinals' spot in the break!

Finally, our one promised autograph:

Generally speaking, I like the Fan Favorites autograph concept that Topps Archives is known for.  It can be fun to get a signature of a guy that doesn't appear in most Topps' products.  Examples for this year's checklist include guys like Jim Abbott, Andre Dawson, and Jimmy Key.  Unfortunately for us, I wouldn't put Slade Cecconi in that same category but at least the design of the card works well for a signature!

Overall, I give the 2024 Topps Archives (Collector's Tin) the following rating:

Set Design:  D

Collation:  A

Opening Thrill:  C

Overall:  C-

We had no collation issues and we did score a rare card, however, it was hard for me to get super excited about the three card designs used in this year's Archives.  In addition, there were some terrible color choices on some of the cards making for nearly unreadable text.  Truthfully, a lot of the design choices made it seem like Topps totally phoned it in when fine-tuning this year's Archives set.  Our box over-delivered on what was promised and yet, I still felt underwhelmed overall.