There are a total of nine Cubs included in this year's 220 card set. Several big names are missing....Ryan Dempster, Aramis Ramirez, Geovany Soto...and were replaced by guys who did little for the team this year....Tyler Colvin, Andrew Cashner, Marcos Mateo. I think Topps locked in their Chrome checklist a little too early in the season.
All nine have already been featured in either the base set or the factory team set. I'll show the Chrome card side by side with its parallel card from the earlier set
Darwin Barney's card is the only one that has a new picture. I like the Chrome picture better.
The two newer Cubs, Matt Garza and Carlos Pena, have Chrome cards that match the Factory Team set. Both of these are mediocre Photoshop jobs.
The other six all have Chrome cards borrowed from the base set.
Topps also released a bunch of different colored refractor parallels and I won't be chasing any of them. In a rare instance of restraint, Topps didn't put out platinum diamond chrome cards. Too bad...it would have been fun to get one just for the name: Diamond Anniversary Platinum Chrome Atomic Refractor. (They did put our canary platinum cards that are 1/1 and going for crazy prices.)
The coating on the cards (and perhaps the cardboard as well) either expand or contract due to temperature changes or moisture content (or maybe both). The cards curl because one of the surfaces (or the cardboard) expands or contracts at a different rate than the other. What I don't understand, is why some years is worse than others. Are they monkeying around with the formula every year? They've been making chrome cards for 15 years. You'd think they'd have it right by now.
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