Topps has announced that this years Finest Football set is going to include limited edition autographed rookie cards, featuring an NFL shield patch (the list of players to be included in this subset can be found HERE). Great news, right? Maybe not. First of all, these Shield Patch Autographs are going to be sequentially numbered to 15. That’s right, what would normally be a 1/1 is now going to be one of fifteen, thus taking away the luster of the NFL shield patch (similar to what Topps did to Superfractors last year).

Additionally, it seems these cards aren’t all they’re made to sound, if the numbering and the sample pictured provided by Topps are any indication. After all, with a run of fifteen on each, there are two possibilities. Either these patches come from jerseys at the Rookie Photo Shoot that the players simply put on and then immediately removed, but yet qualifying them as event used, or they are some cheap manufactured patch that equates to nothing more than a piece of decorative fabric embedded in the card.

This latter conclusion will be even worse if, as the picture indicates, the shield is a replica of the old NFL Shield Logo, rather than the new one that features only four stars on each side of the football.

So, while Topps makes the big announcement assumingly providing collectors with what they want, we collectors are left with a very watered-down byproduct of one of the more popular trends in chase cards in recent history.

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