2012 Topps Update - Only Look

As usual, the Topps Update set features the same design as the regular set, so no surprises there. I only bought two rack boxes. These have 72 cards wrapped in cellophane. A lot easier to get to the cards.

First off, a complaint. A number of the cards had corners cut off. This Austin Kearns card was about the worst.

You can easily see that the bottom right corner is sliced off.

On the back view you can see that the opposite corner is also sliced. I had put the cards in numeric order before I started scanning them. 5 cards all lower than card 100 were like this. The higher number cards seemed to be OK.

Why did I put the cards in numeric order? Because Topps included short-print alternate versions of a bunch of the cards. There was no obvious way to tell which cards were alternates so I was checking them against the Beckett.com list. The first 7 cards have alternate cards which feature different players.  There are about 38 variation cards, the rest of them feature different poses of the same player. I haven't gotten through all the cards in detail but it looks like I only pulled one short-print.

Apparently, the regular card features only Sale and is vertical. Neither Beckett.com nor baseballcardpedia.com give any details on how short is short.

I got 7 of the serial numbered gold parallels. 3 were from the Update set and 4 were from the regular set. I hadn't noticed but there were no gold parallels in the regular set. They're all in the Update set. I don't remember Topps pulling this stunt before. At least one of them was this:

I hadn't pulled a single Kendrick card for 2012.

I got one of these Gold Sparkle cards.

I'm not sure I'm that excited about this effect anymore.

There were several inserts that were the same as the regular set and one that was new.

It's the only 2012 Ichiro card I have featuring him as a Yankee and he's not in uniform.