2015 Topps Gypsy Queen Baseball Trading Cards Box Break Recap And Review

2015 Topps Gypsy Queen Baseball Cards is now in its fifth year.  While this is still a set builders look forward to putting together, some of the early elements that made it fun and different have been dropped leaving this just another option in a wide variety of cards to collect. Unfortunately without those elements (who remembers the original speculation about the Gypsy Queens and Kings?) there are many similarities to other releases so we might see GQ start to take a back seat to others.  What continues to make this a desirable product, and saves it in many ways, are the on-card autographs. 

Gypsy Queen falls under our classification of trading cards.  You can find it in retails and hobby form with Hobby Boxes containing 24 – 10 card packs with a box topper of 10 minis and 2 relic and 2 autograph cards.

Here are some of the cards we pulled.

Base Set

 Ozzie Smith, front and back

 Nolan Ryan, Lou Gehrig, David Ortiz

 Hank Aaron, George Springer, Jose Abreu

 Bryce Harper, Matt Harvey, Steve Carlton

 Rickey Henderson, Billy Hamilton, Manny Machado

 Andrew McCutchen, Russell Martin, RobinYount

 Framed Base#/499

Adam Jones, Jose Altuve

Minis 

Gerritt Cole, Base and Mini for size comparison 

 Mini Parallels and Variants

Joe Mauer silver #/199, Evan Gattis silver #/199, Carlos Gonzalez red #/50, The Cut-Off 

Inserts

Pillars of the Community

 Robinson Cano

Walk Off Winners

Bill Mazeroski, Scott Hattenberg 

 Carlos Gonzalez, Lenny Dykstra

David Freese, Salvador Perez

The Queens Throwbacks 

James Shields, Jered Weaver

George Springer, Anthony Rizzo 

 Glove Stories

Ben Revere, Aaron Hicks 

 Mookie Betts, Mike Moustakas

The Hits

Adam Wainwright Framed Relic, Shelby Miller Relic 

Cory Spangenberg Auto, Javier Baez Auto

Overall Look

While Gypsy Queen has a strong base card look, we’ve seen this kind of photo manipulation with other series of cards, very close to releases like Ginter for example.  Photo manipulation can be a little heavy handed and the reuse of certain photos, even from prior years, is abundantly clear. The absence of stats on the back is normally an issue for me, but feels appropriate for this release. The autograph card design saves this release from obscurity,

Quality and Variety of Players and Subsets.

This is a good mixture of the past and the present with the big names of yesterday, today and the future all represented very well.

Do the hits hold up?

On-card autos look fantastic with a shot at some big names.  The mini auto booklets are cool but use of a sticker auto. One wonders how much bester these would be if they were on-card just like the mini autograph set.

Will you want to collect them all?

This is still a fun set to build and offers collectors a variety of options to sink their teeth into.

Rating

3 out of 5

2015 Topps Gypsy Queen Baseball receives a lukewarm reception from us. It could use an infusion of something a little more special to bring back interest in this once exciting release.


Review box provided by Topps