Card show Part 3: Soccer

I'm actually a soccer fan the other 3 years and 11 months that the World Cup isn't going on. I've been to top level professional matches in Europe, ie. Real Madrid, and actually prefer the experience to any live sports experience I've had in the US. There's nothing like being in a stadium surrounded by 80,000 people singing and chanting in unison.

Well anyways, yesterday at the show I bought soccer cards for the first time in my life. One dealer had an open box of 2014 Topps MLS and I picked up five packs.

I like the base set design. Thank goodness Topps decided to go with something completely different rather than the generic variations on the same design that they use year after year with baseball and football.

I thought this was a pretty cool insert.

The box also features 3 autos and 3 relics and in the 5 packs I bought I landed 2 of the autos.

Cool to get an auto of a member of the US World Cup team.

Like normal with Topps, the set also features parallels. And the numbering makes me think that this is a VERY short printed set. The most common parallel at 1:5 packs is blue and they're numbered to just 50. I got two of those.

41/50

44/50

Short printing this set, at least compared to their baseball and football releases, was probably a smart move on Topps' part. I imagine that there likely isn't anywhere near as large a market for an MLS set so they were able to keep the print run low while still keeping it affordable for collectors. Based on my calculations, which are probably wrong, that would mean they only produced 165 hobby cases.

While I probably won't buy anymore of this set, it was fun to open a few packs and land a couple autos as well.