Topps 206: Retail vs. Hobby
I bought nine packs of retail 206 and eight packs of hobby at The Back Stop (the home of Dr. Wax). After looking through the packs, there are some notable differences.
Retail: six cards at $2.99/pack (.498 cents/card) with one mini and one bronze card
Hobby: nine cards at $5/pack (.555 cents/card) with one mini and one bronze card
There are two autograph or relic cards per hobby box. There are similar odds for retail, but I am not entirely sure what the odds are. The 1/1 Carolina Brights, cut signature books and printing plate are exclusive to hobby. You cannot pull these out of retail.
Everything else is up for grabs.
Here was my break down.
Base cards
Hobby: 54 cards, 2 Mantle checklists. No doubles.
Retail: 35 cards, 1 Mantle checklist. Four doubles.
Bronze
Hobby: 7 cards (Mantle, Bruce, Wang, Burrell, Reimold, Cordero, Perez from TB)
Retail: 8 cards (Munson, Crede, Varitek, Hardy, Bedard, Wang, Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez)
Mini
Hobby: 7 cards all Piedmont (Perez from TB, Ramiro Pena, Foxx, Stewert, Renteria, Uehara, Whitesell)
Retail: 9 cards. 1 Polar Bear (Papelbon), 2 Cycle /99 (Matt Kemp, Victor Martinez), Piedmont (Papelbon, Schafer, Scales, Perry, Cobb, Marquis)
No number variation
Hobby: Alex Rodriguez
Retail: Honus Wagner
Hits
Hobby: Ryan Braun auto
Retail: Elvis Andrus auto redemption
And not one single Derek Jeter card.
Sign up for the Card Chat newsletter here!
You destroyed the odds with those two autos. Congrats!
That seems like a freakazoid blaster to me. 2 Cycle backs, and an auto? You definitely killed it the odds with that one.
The retail were loose packs. I didn't pick up a blater.
Sooz, I've got your Jeter card; Still looking at those two Red Sox minis (V-Mart and Pap)
cardboardicons…. wait til you see what else I pulled today…
I have a Jeter base card from the set. Bought it off eBay last week.
I was just noting that I never pull Jeter cards.
Wooty woot woot.
And you live near Dr. Wax! You are lucky. I used to watch his breaks all the time.
Jeter drought = : (
Seriously though, gnarly retail spread.
Some the minis I've pulled from T206 are of a different sort of card stock – a little more like the bronze parallels than the base cards. Have you noticed this, or maybe I'm just getting a few weird ones?
Semi-salivating over the Andrus redemption. Only semi because its a redemption. Nice pulls from the retail packs.
Retail FTW. As many retail hits as I've been seeing from bloggers, I wonder if the thick bronze cards are actually causing problems for pack searchers. You'd think with relatively easy odds for autos, they'd be all over it.
You're pulling all of the Red Sox hits and I'm getting Old Mill framed A-Rod bat relics here in Boston. It figures.
Great pulls for the amount of packs that you bought. Congrats.
If it were up to me, every time I touched a pack, the Red Sox cards would magically disappear and be replaced by Yankees.
But it's not and I get a stinking pile of rubbish instead!