2018 Topps Heritage High - The Rookies Round 2!
The MLB regular season is wrapping up, the start of football season has peaked the interest of collectors, but Topps isn’t quite done with its 2018 baseball offerings. Bowman Chrome and Topps Update are highly anticipated releases, but the popular Heritage set gets an update of its own! Heritage High Number is back again for another 225 card set which provides a first Heritage card for several rookies and a card in the new uniform of several other players who were traded throughout 2018.
The first 200 cards, numbered 501-700 have a standard print run and contain the highly sought after rookie cards of Juan Soto, Ronald Acuna Jr., Gleyber Torres, and Shohei Ohtani. As of this writing, a four card lot of just those rookies is selling for almost as much as a complete base set! Cards 701-725 are short printed and fall approximately one in every three packs. Ichiro, Andrew McCutchen, JD Martinez, and Jake Arrieta are a few of the bigger names found in the short print checklist.
This Ohtani action was by far my biggest card of the box.
Several photo, color swap, and error variations provide a popular chase element to Heritage and are actually where much of the “value” in this product comes from. Each hobby box promises either an autograph or a game used relic card. It seems a twelve box case will yield 3 - 4 autographs with the remaining boxes containing relics.
Several insert sets are included in the release, many of which are focused on remembering the 1969 season. Reggie Jackson gets his own tribute set to celebrate the fact his rookie card is found in the 1969 release. The Amazin’ Mets also get their own set to go along with the 1969 Deckle Edge tributes. Bazooka, Decals, and “1969 Collector Cards” are retail exclusives which can be found in packs bought from Walmart or Target. The Award Winners, Combo Cards, Rookie Performers, and Now & Then sets are a mainstay of Heritage High Number and are back again to provide an opportunity for Topps to release addition cards of some of the season’s biggest rookies and stars.
I had one case of this product on preorder, and ended up selling back 8 of the 12 boxes to my local LCS. I opened up the other four and had a lot of fund doing so. You can check out the results below!
I ended up with one auto and three relics. The Rafael Devers will be headed to my own PC, but the Clayton Kershaw went straight to EBay and provided some additional profit and a nice addition to the PC of a California collector. The Cubs fan in me was excited to see David Bote on the checklist. He’s become a fan favorite with the mid-season contributions he made while filling in for several players who spent time on the DL.
With this rookie class, I’ve decided to hold onto all four base sets I completed instead of selling the three extras. That’s one nice thing about the Heritage High set, you can almost put together the standard base set out of a single hobby box, and you’ll also have about a third of the short prints. Then you’ll be able to pick up the remaining cards to complete the set for a reasonable price. For some reason, Heritage High doesn’t usually hold the same value as the standard release, but this year may be an exception. Time will tell if the strong rookie class will drive enough demand to keep prices up, but regardless it makes a great continuation of the 2018 Heritage set.