SAPPHIRE TAKES THE STAGE | 2024-25 Topps Chrome Sapphire Basketball Review

SAPPHIRE TAKES THE STAGE | 2024-25 Topps Chrome Sapphire Basketball Review

I don’t think I get any more push back in the hobby than when I tell you that an unlicensed basketball product is actually pretty good. So, here we go again. An unlicensed basketball product is pretty good. And I will talk about why after this. [Music] What’s going on, YouTube? It is your boy RGL coming at you again with a brand new unlicensed basketball video. I can’t wait to read the comment section in this one. Go ahead, hit that subscribe button if you’re going to comment. And as always, I do appreciate a like. Topps Chrome Sapphire Basketball. Man, last year this one had a bunch of problems and they’ve all been fixed this year. And this one came out on Topps’ website was sitting there for hours at $200 a box for one autograph and some of the best looking cards in the game. Although, let’s be real, it is unlicensed basketball. We do not have logos on the jerseys. And when you’re doing basketball cards, that’s just a big thing. On football, you can kind of hide it and make it looks better. On basketball, there is no hiding it unless you got the Tops logo over the Steph Curry’s uh jersey where the Warriors logo would be. Even worse with the Warriors, they can’t even say Golden State. They have to put San Francisco. But at a certain point, a certain price point, it makes a lot of sense. And right now with where the hobby is with everybody wanting, you know, $100 hobby boxes and $200 hobby boxes, this is a $200 Sapphire box with one autograph per. This is a box with LeBron James and Steph Curry on the checklist for autographs. That’s right, WMBB 2. And of course, the 2024 252 rookie class as well, Kevin Durant, Larry Bird. You got all those chases for $200. It just starts to make sense. Um, so we have three boxes here today. These are currently selling on the secondary market. Now that they’re sold out, sold out. They’re currently selling for about 300 to 325 a box. So if you were just, you know, grabbed a few cases at $2,000 a pop, make a cool, you know, after fees, 30% back, uh, just waiting a couple weeks. Uh, we’re going to check out three boxes today. Normally Sapphire is a lot more expensive. Over on the baseball side of things, you basically can’t rip a Sapphire box anymore that you bought on the secondary market for under like 800 bucks. That’s like the cost of 24 sapphire. The cost of 25 Bowman is like $1,200 or something ridiculous like that. 32 cards total, four cards per pack, eight packs per box. About three color per sapphire selections look really, really good. And we’re going to get about three color per box. Now, last year this one had a variety of problems. Last year it was released at $500 a box during Webby Mania. That sucked. Last year the original box art said it had two autographs and come to find out it only had one. There was a little bit of bait and switch. This year $200 a box, one autograph clearly stated. And uh yeah, hopefully we see something nice today. And uh at $200, you know, like I’ve been saying, not a lot of hobby boxes in that range. I think you can do far worse at 200 a pop. Uh there is going to be Joel Embiid. We’ve got Antonio Reeves. And uh there we go. Alexander Sar, our first uh decent rookie of the box. Now, you know, they did the absolute best they could. This these cards do look better than last year. It is still a glaring oversight to not have uh Wizards uh you know, name or anything like that district on the jersey. Uh so, that does suck. I feel like they’re doing the best they can. And even though it’s been a rough what, like last year and a half or so without uh with unlicensed basketball cards, it’s all going to be over cuz come October, we are going to be chasing after Cooper Flag in uh in his Dallas uniform and licensed Topps chrome basketball. Um so that license transfers over from Panini. Whether that is good or bad, I think we’ll all have to decide. I think we would prefer if both Panini and Topps continue to make licensed basketball cards. I think that’s the overarching uh sentiment. But the license is transferring. The whole new world is upon us. Uh, and upon us is Tracy McGrady and Jared Vanderbilt with a devilish look on his face. We got Jaylen Bridges on the rookie and our yellow. This is our auto rookie. It’s not a rookie. It’s going to wear it a 50 on the uh on the yellow or on the gold sapphire. So, they have done a much better job with the poses on the players covering up the where their where the logo would be. I think as far as unlicensed basketball goes, this is probably as best as it’s gonna get. I don’t think it can get much better than this, personally. Um, and this price point does make a lot of sense. You know, when you compare it to other things, Mosaic at $600 a box, $550, $600 a box. Uh, ripping three of these or one Mosaic. I think I’m going to take three of these. Of course, that was the price if you could get it off of Tops.com. And it did sit there for quite a while. For Phoenix, that is going to be Devin Booker to 999. And that is our second of I think we’re going to get three color or so and we are going to get an auto as well. Devin Booker man I don’t know about that Suns team. That’s going to be a it’s going to be an interesting team to watch. Um there’s an orange to 25 here. Of course we are chasing after the Pad Paradashes Paparadashes. Paper, however you pronounce it. That’s what we’re looking for. Uh Tyler Hero Payton Pritchard and for Indiana the Pacers. Sure hope this is not our auto. It’s our auto. It’s Aaron Nesmith. I guess that’s better than Fury or I guess Fury tore up the summer league, so I can’t say that. Uh, eat your heart out, Pora. How much you want to pay for pay me for this one. 22 to 25. Our first autograph of the day is Aaron Nesmith. Guess you could do much worse on this checklist. There’s much worse names on this checklist than Nmith. Uh, we got we have purple. That’s our either our third color or we getting extra color. Uh, Laravia, Larry Johnson. We’ve got John Morant throwing it down. Purple for Atlanta. Not a rookie. That’s Kobe Buffkin to 10. One of 10. Looking a little foolish and needed a little color correction on him. Uh, Kobe Buffkin to 10. We wanted to see Zachary Rishet right there. Got three more packs. I’m curious to see if we’re going to see a fourth color. We’re only supposed to get three, I believe. Oh, we have Sapphire Selections in here. So, uh, I’m already liking where we’re going in this video. There’s Trey Young. We’ve got Fred Van Vleet. Sapphire Selections. Uh, Jaylen T. Okay, never mind. Uh, I will say that’s not my favorite Sapphire Selections design. That one’s actually a step down from last year. Last year’s design was pretty good. I don’t like this all on the bottom. It kind of looks like a Disney card to be perfectly honest. I don’t like that at all. Um, yeah, it’s not my favorite looking. I’m curious if how the color looks like the golds and the oranges 25 cuz that’s definitely not my favorite down there. I would prefer more of a fullble bleed uh design. Sapphire selections just added a couple years ago. I think that that’s a little bit of a misstep. We have another color. We have our fourth color of the box. Uh ShenGun Bamio James Harden. And for Detroit basketball, Marcus Sasser 999. And uh yeah, our final pack here in our first box. We are checking out three boxes today. Don’t ask me why I chose three. Thought about doing a half case and I said that’s too much DGEN. Uh so we’ll just do three. Uh Draymond Green, uh Kyle Koosma, and uh Chris Livingston. So our first box produced what? Five color? Yeah. Uh four fourcolor. Yeah, four color sapphire selections and an auto. Uh, Klaya Wear, Booker, Kobe Buffkin, Marcus Sasser, Jaylen Tyson. Our auto is Aaron Eith, and we did have a top rookie in Alexander Sar. All right, box number two. Hopefully better than box number one. Hopefully, three boxes gives us a good sample size at what to expect on this one. And hopefully we see uh, you know what, I’m not going into this one expecting to see a LeBron or a Steph Curry auto. Would be nice. Or it would be nice to just see a top color, top rookie color of Sar Rish or one of those guys. And our first pack, nothing crazy in here. Pasco Seakum Dirk. Uh Damen Lillard now with Portland and Paul George reuniting uh in Portland. Damen Lillard. Pretty cool. We have gold in this pack. There’s going to be Anthony Black. We’ve got Omac Dwade. Gold. Not our auto though. That is going to be KG 250. Kevin Garnett to 50. 49 of 50 on the KG. So we’ll count the color in here. See if we get four more color as well. Or we just got an extra in that last box. We have orange or green in here. There is going to be a second year Victor Webeanama. We were all chasing after him last year. Jordan Hawkins, Penny Hardway, Orlando, and that is going to be Tristan D Silva. I pull a lot of the Silva for myself. If you missed my photogenic video, I pulled a gold Tristan Dilva auto for myself. Dilva, even the Webby’s will have a little bit of value. Webby Mania year two loading on up. I should say year three loading on up. Actually, uh we’ve got uh Orange in here. We’ve been ripping, we’ve been looking for Webby rookies for so damn long. Forgot that he’s entering his third year. uh second year kind of a wash with uh with the injury, but I’m looking forward to what he does in year three. Uh Anthony Edwards, our auto is right here. It’s a next stop. So, this is going to be a rookie auto. Is that uh that’s going to be to or KJ Simpson to 25. KJ Simpson, our auto again, a sticker auto. Next stop to 25. So, I know LeBron is on the skylight autograph. So, we want to see a skylight for a chance at a LeBron. Nice little ant right there. I’m very curious to see how good these cards are going to look when this uh when they do have the licensing. And uh of course that should affect the value of the first two years of unlicensed uh Tops basketball unfortunately. Um but that being said, something like a Curry autograph or a LeBron autograph is always going to have value even if it’s unlicensed simply because there are not enough of those in the market to meet the demand. Uh we have gold sapphire selection. So, I got my wish. Take a look at what a gold sapphire selections looks like. Scoot Henderson, Jaylen Wells, and there’s going to be Eric Gordon. Gold Sapphire Selections, I believe. Uh, that’s going to be uh Rob Dillingham to 50. All right. Looks a little better. Still not my favorite Sapphire Selections design. I really just don’t like that. I just don’t think it’s necessary on the bottom. Let’s get rid of this. Put the design all the way down. Keep the rookie logo. Just keep Dillingham on that little piece of white and get rid of all of this Mickey Mouse stuff cuz I I just don’t need it. It looks like Magical Kingdom to me for some reason. Rob Dillingham to 50 on the uh Sapphire Selections gold. And we’ll see what else we have here. Another green AJ Johnson. Uh Larry Legend like that one. Tristan Newton from Minnesota. And for Oklahoma City, JDub 72 of 99 now an NBA champion. Jaylen Williams. Last pack here. Box number two. And we have one more box. Thank you for joining me on today on a little bit longer of a video. Little unlicensed video. I know they’re not going to like it. They’re not going to like this one. They’re going to tell me it should be sold for $49. Uh Jamal Murray and Colin Ston. So, I’m just hoping that we have a big hit in this box so then everybody could say that it was a great video and it’s a great product. Uh even though we’re opening three boxes, we’re getting a pretty decent sample size. I’m never resultsorientated uh on these videos, whether or not I have a good box or a bad box. Uh I just look at the product overall compared to everything else on the market. Consider the price point, consider the ceiling, consider the floor, all of those things. And that’s kind of how I evaluate a product. So at this price point, even at the secondary price point, you can do way, way, way worse in the hobby. Uh and maybe we can do good because we have orange in here. Um, but this one is not egregious. Not compared to last year when it was 500 bucks and uh promises of two autos when it only had one. There’s definitely some gripes last year that you could have for sure with the product. This year around though, if you were able to get these off of Tops.com at 200 bucks, I really do think that they were a good buy. All right, so we have San Francisco. This could be Steph Curry. It’s not though. It’s Brandon Pumpsky to 25. Pods to 25 on the orange. Not what we were hoping to see. Risha, a good rookie, one of the top rookies in the set. And we’ll keep on ripping today. Trying to hit something to pay for all six boxes or all three boxes. See, what I really want to do is I want to hit a monster so I can go grab like two more boxes. Uh Lonnie Walker, Nick Smith Jr. for Utah. Please don’t be our auto. Colin section on the team color to 50. Not that I don’t want a Philippowski. I don’t want a Philippowski auto. I just want a chance at a ceiling auto. That that’s that’s that’s all. Nothing against your team if your team is Utah. I just really didn’t want to see a Utah auto right there. Uh we have green in this pack. There’s uh Adam Bano. We got Jiren Jackson Jr. Benny Matherin. This is not our auto either. It’s for Oh, I’m really glad it’s not our auto. Not that I don’t like Sabonis. It’s just that all my autos in my daily videos are usually for the Kings. I think it’s a Lakers card and then I always get fooled. That’s a Kings card. 53 of 99. Demonus Sabonis. And we’re getting down to the wire today. Is that a red auto? Is that a red auto? Red rookie auto, I believe. Well, good luck me. Dave Mitchell, Demar De Rozan. Never wanted to see a good auto in my life than right now as a certified rookie. Oh man. Oh man, I deserve that one. I definitely deserve that one for for that that little rant about Utah. Not only is it a Utah rookie, it is easily the worst Utah rookie in the set. That is Cody Williams 305 red Sapphire auto. Yeah, I never want to never want to open this product again. As I was saying, this product is not good. You shouldn’t open it and it should be $50. Nope, that’s not what I’m going to do. We are not resultsorientated, but there’s something ironic about going on a little pre uh ramble about uh not wanting a Utah auto and then getting a red Utah auto to five. It couldn’t be more poetic than that. I hate it here. And I will just leave it at that. Uh we have four packs left today. Listen, it’s just trolling me, right? It’s trolling me for the for the curry that we’re about to get like right there. I cannot believe that just happened. Uh, Beef Stew, Enrique Freeman. I literally cannot believe that that just happened. I want my Philippowski auto. I want my Isaiah Collier auto. I literally cannot believe that happened. I think we have a Sapphire selections here. Miles Turner and LaMelo Ball. There’s Marcus Smart. And there’s going to be Alexander Sar. I wanted that auto to be Sarish or Jaylen Wells. One of those guys. sar on our sapphire selections and we’re down to two packs today. I want to thank you for joining me and I want to see one more color. I want to sweat. There’s a there’s a green. We got Kevin McCullers Jr. Fron Vagner. Jeremy Sohan. Oh, going back to Indiana with a Hallebertton. What the hell? Uh 85.99 on the Hallebertton. Another one for Porus PC. And uh let’s wrap it up in style cuz we probably going to have a base pack to close it out, I would imagine. I think that’s all of our color, right? Yep. That’s all of our color. We’re going to end today with Carmelo Anthony, Ron Holland, rookie Taylor Hendricks, and the Joker. Uh just like Tops Chrome being a Sapphire being a joker to me today. We got three boxes. If we bought them off Topps.com, we paid 600 bucks in tax. If we bought them on the secondary market, you would have paid 900 in tax. Three boxes. And unfortunately, most of them were dusty. We had a red auto of Cody Williams. We did get like four color on average per box, which is nice to get four color in an auto. Dillingham to 50 might have been our best card of the day. KJ Simpson to 25 was decent. I do like Dilva. We had a KG to 50, too. So, not a total wash today. Some some okay color, just our red and our purple were not the best. Um, but like I said, even at 300 bucks on the secondary market, I like this one. I know you guys are not going to not going to want to hear that, but that’s just the reality of kind of where basketball cards are and looking at things. Uh, of course with this one, the ceiling, the allure is going to be Steph Curry, LeBron James autographs. Uh, and then of course Stephon Castle, Sar, and Rishch who you cannot get in Panini products as far as autographs go. So unlicensed rookie year autographs is all you’re going to get. Uh, I do believe that Topps is going to only have a couple sets for the 2425 class. I think we’re going to get Topps Chrome, Topps Finest, maybe one more. And then once that license transfers over, I’m fairly confident they’re not able to do 2425 under that license. I’m pretty sure they have to start with the 2025 2026 branded class, which is going to be Cooper Flag, Dylan Harper, uh, and Bailey, among others. So, uh, I think that’s going to be it for this class. So if you want a license a autograph of one of those top names from the 2024 2025 class that are not signing a panini sapphire or chrome or finest coming out in a couple weeks are going to be literally your only products to do so. I like this one. I don’t love this one. I do like this one. Uh but what do you guys think? Leave me a comment below. Comment section on these videos is always fun. That is going to do it for me. Take care. Stay safe. We’ll catch you next time on Down the Road.

Last year’s Topps Chrome Sapphire had a TON of problems. Not only was the product far too expensive, original box art showed two autographs but it only delivered one auto, leading to a lot of collector resentment. This year Sapphire is back for year two and this time expectations are tempered and the price has been cut in half.

With a checklist of autographs featuring Stephon Castle, Zaccharie Risacher, Alexandre Sarr, Lebron James, Victor Wembanyama, and Steph Curry, at what point does an unlicensed basketball product start to warrant consideration to be ripped? This one checks all the boxes for a product that has potential to be solid value for the price point. Let’s rip into 3 today and try to hit that Lebron Auto!
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