The latest baseball card set to hit the market is Topps Archives, a 200-card nostalgia driven set that recycles the designs of a number of older Topps products.
The base set has four different designs, inspired by Topps’ 1972, 1982, 1985 and 1990 baseball offerings. A couple of the designs seem like odd choices. I’ve yet to meet a collector who loves the garish 1990 set, and while I love the 1972 design I think that Topps is going to that particular well a bit too much – we already had a 50-card set of mini cards inspired by it in Topps Series I.
Five Mets made the cut: Dwight Gooden has a card in the 1972 style, Ike Davis has one in the 1990 style, and David Wright, Johan Santana and Tom Seaver landed in the 1982 section. Only Wright is still actually playing for the Mets…
There are also 45 shortprint cards, which feature players from the past on card designs from their era with new photos, and a whole mess of inserts.
I’m not super-excited about this set, but I did spend $3 to pick up a few cards that interested me at this weekend’s baseball card show. I don’t plan to buy any more, unless I run into a good deal for any of the Mets autographs and have some extra cash at the time.
PaulHadsall.com 
There are a bunch of Mets in the short prints – as if Mets fans aren’t suffering enough this year – plus other cards like Ray Knight with the Reds and Hubie Brooks with the Expos. I’ll probably wait until sometime in 2014 to try to pick these up.
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I don’t like this set enough to chase after short-printed parallel universe versions of cards that belong in the common box.:-)
I like the two Gary Carter cards and the Darryl Strawberry one (mainly because the great photo.) And the 4 player Mets sticker/card thing is cool. I really could have done without the Mets.
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