Robot Claw

On May The Fourth – aka “Star Wars day” – I purchased this:

Don’t let the size fool you. It’s a single pack of Star Wars trading cards. Not just any cards though, the premium ‘High-Tek’ series from late last year. Here’s the inside of the box:

Topps spares no expense on packaging do they? Here’s how big that single pack is:

Now here’s the evil truth: this single pack cost me $60. Sixty dollars. Sixty dollars! Also it was on sale (due to Star Wars day). It’s normally $75!!

So let’s look inside:

Eight cards. Eight. $60 for only eight trading cards. Admittedly they’re all plastic, but there’s only 8 of them, and they all look sameish, and all feature characters of dubious interest. 

I could go into lots of detail here about how the all-plastic nature of the set is actually a negative, or how these cards themselves aren’t even as good as the plastic chase cards in the Aus/UK Rogue One set (which was $1/pack!) but there’s really no need because they cost me $7.50 each and that’s highway robbery!

So why so expensive? It’s because each pack contains an autographed card. Here’s mine:

Yes dear readers, that’s the actual autograph of Jett “George is my dad” Lucas, legendary non-actor who played youngling Zett Jukassa in Episodes 1 and 2. I’m sure you remember his blink-and-you-miss-him character fondly.

Now instead of $60 for 8 cards, you could think of this as, say, $5 for 7 cards and $55 for this dudes autograph. Except the auto itself goes for about a tenner on eBay.

In short, this product is a total ripoff. Not worth it by any stretch for the cards themself, with an autograph of extremely questionable worth as my reward. I was taken for a ride by Topps 🙂

Am I bitter or regretful? Of course not! To be honest I didn’t expect much going in, so in that sense it lived down to my expectations. Plus the gambling factor can’t be denied: I could have found this:

Or an autograph by Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Daisy Ridley etc. Autographs by these main characters sell for $1000+ on eBay, and that’s the reason like a product such as this exists. It’s not even the most expensive SW trading card set!

So a total ripoff, which had a small chance of being amazing, but made a good blog post anyway 🙂

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2017 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Blog, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trading Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.