the days of archives

not quite "sands through the hourglass" stuff, but i spent a little bit of time on wednesday opening the blaster of 2025 topps archives that i ordered from topps. the official release day wasn't until yesterday, so i was surprised to see the fedex man with this part of my order. i also ordered a blaster of 2025 topps chrome update which did supposedly release on wednesday, but that hasn't shown up yet. go figure.

the first two cards out of the first pack were these ones:

and the first two cards out of the second pack were these ones:

thankfully, the third pack strayed from this pattern, as did all the others.

each pack included cards from the three designs being used this year - 1964 (as seen above), 1996

(the return of the phantom zone inset photo!) and 2005

we are officially in the joey votto legend era, and i always enjoy seeing teddy ballgame on cards, although the dangling socks placement on this one is suspect. plus, topps used this same photo last year on the 1994 design.

as far as the designs go, things are pretty faithful to the originals, but there are some font differences for sure. i am still of the opinion that 1996 topps looks better in landscape format, and there are some of those to be had

the luis robert card is nice but i really like the connor norby even if the rookie card logo seems to float a bit. topps included other marlins rookies with the 1996 design

and you can see the rc logo floats in the portrait design, too.

stan musial's card

caught my eye as a nice looking card.

i guess my least favorite design used this year is 2005. having the player's name on the side makes the last name up top redundant and a waste of space. here's drake baldwin's card

as well as matt shaw's

i am liking those cub unis and am glad to see them on so many cards.

regarding keepers, i found a couple. shohei ohtani's card

and freddie freeman's card

go to the dodger collection, and vladimir guerrero's card

is for my player collection.

the blaster promised four black foil parallels, and here they are:

not a bad group there. the ozzie albies card looks especially nice with the black foil border.

i found another parallel - an "aqua scope foilboard" numbered to 75 of brenton doyle

his base card was also in one of the packs.

and then there are the inserts. not all inserts were represented in my blaster, but i did get a 1995 topps cyberstats season in review card of jung hoo lee

and a 2007 topps all-star card of fernando tatis jr

and then, of course, dylan crews made an appearance with a 1987 boardwalk & baseball insert

the first two cards are pretty true to the original design, although the season in review card of lee doesn't deal with the "what if" aspect that the original 1995 cards did. as for the boardwalk & baseball insert, topps has replaced the b/b on the originals with a team logo in the lower right. i guess that means there will be no "no slash" variations available.

the big card from the blaster was a fan favorites autograph:

ol' zebulon is a bit of a fan favorite here, although it might be because of his unique name. as a pitcher he had middling success in 2025 which was in line with most other twins players.

not a bad blaster to rip, and it was early to boot! a fun way to spend part of one of the days of my life.