2012 Bowman Platinum

This is the third straight year for Bowman Platinum. I didn't care much for the 2010 version but 2011 was better. This year is at least as good as 2012. This is an expensive product which I don't buy much of. This year I bought a blaster and a rack pack. This pretty much means I'm not going to see a relic or an auto or any of the rarer parallels.

The base cards have a slightly different design than last year but retain the holographic foil board. For a card which costs 68 cents a pop, it looks good. I got a total of 47 cards.

According to baseballcardpedia, the hobby boxes are loaded but look to be going for over $100 on ebay.

The first card in the 100-card base set is last year's big rookie. This cards look real good when scanned as well.

I also pulled this years top rookie

Actually, I got two of these, one each in the blaster and the rack pack. The only duplicate I pulled.

I only pulled one Phillie

There are 5 other Phillies in the set, Rollins, Utley, Lee, Halladay and Hamels. Some team must be under-represented. If there are any Astros in the base set, I don't recognize their names.

I'm always to pull a 2012 Chipper.

There are lots of parallels. The base set comes in Emerald (1:10), Gold (1:5) and Ruby (1:20). I pulled two Golds and an Emerald.

In addition to the 100-card base set, there is a 100-card set of Prospects.

While featuring the same basic design as the base set, the backgrounds are different. The base cards have game setting backgrounds. The prospects have a weird radioactive sky background.

The Prospect parallels are called Refractors. They have a different finish than the base parallels, more like Topps Chrome cards.

These come in regular, Atomic, X, Blue, Gold, Green, Purple, Red and Super. I only bought the rack pack to get the Purple, which are exclusive to the rack packs.

You get three of them in a separate wrapper. They are real purple, not my favorite color.

There is a 50-card Top Prospects insert set. I pulled three of them. There is a die cut version as well.

There is also the 50-card Cutting Edge Stars insert set. This set is die cut with auto and relic versions.  I only got one of these.

It's a nice looking card but it illustrates one of my major pet peeves in baseball cards, the use of the same photograph on different cards issued in the same year. Here's Gallardo's Bowman card. I could be wrong but it looks like the same photo to me.