This year, I somehow made it all the way until October before I bought my first box of baseball cards for myself. Topps released this year's edition of Allen & Ginter (my favorite brand) in October, so, of course, I had to break my spending moratorium and buy a couple of boxes.
Unfortunately, like just about everything in life, the boxes were vastly overpriced, but I'm not going to let that spoil the set for me. The fact that I couldn't buy as much A&G as I normally do does mean that I'll be even more reliant on trade partners - and one such trade has already arrived at my house!
TCDB user Bgrass8791 and I worked out a 9-for-9 swap where I landed nine cards from this year's A&G set. We'll start with the lone base card of the trade - Barry Larkin's base card that didn't show up in either of the first two boxes that I ripped!
Amazingly, I'm still missing 30 base cards from the 300 base card set (and, it should be noted, there are no short prints this year).
Next, a pair of full-sized inserts from the Career 250 set.
This set is fine, I guess. I think A&G could do without so many full-sized insert sets, and this particular one is such a mish-mash of players (with plenty of players appearing multiple times in the set) that I find it hard to care much about. That said, I'm a collector at heart, so I'm still building the dumb thing.
Moving on to better stuff, the minis!
This year's edition of A&G only has two non-baseball mini sets to go after. The first is a 50-card set celebrating ways to say hello in various languages.
I do think Topps has done a lot of country flag sets lately, so I guess this is at least a bit of a unique take on the tired formula of a large mini set all about different countries.
The final two cards from this particular trade were also minis, one from the Musical Methods set and the other from the mini N34 set:
I like both of these sets quite a bit, easily my favorite mini sets from the 2026 edition of A&G. Unfortunately, I do think this is one of the weakest overall Allen & Ginter offerings in several years. I like the fact that the base set has no short prints, but I think Topps could have kept the usual 350-card set size. There isn't a lot of excitement in most of the inserts (full-sized or mini), but even so, I'm going to go after this year's set once again, though if Topps makes next year's set just as dull, I might finally bow out of collecting the brand once and for all.
Best of luck with your 2026 A&G set builds. Just looked at the 50 Ways to Say Hello checklist and found two I'll be trying to add to the collection. Also noticed that the Hello and Musical Methods were the only mini non-sports related inserts, which is kind of a bummer.
ReplyDelete