Wow! Rittenhouse Does Women Right With The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary Trading Cards!

The Good: Impressive chase cards, Flashy common set, Some very cool autograph signers, Neat costume cards, Awesome sketch cards
The Bad: Somewhat irksome collectibility
The Basics: Rittenhouse Archives proves they still have a winning formula for Star Trek trading cards with their new "The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary" set!


Rittenhouse Archives has had the license to produce Star Trek trading cards for over a decade and a half and watching how the company has developed its products over the years has been fascinating to watch for both collectors and Star Trek fans. A decade ago, Rittenhouse Archives made the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek into a three-year affair, with four trading card sets commemorating the entire franchise and each of the three seasons of the original Star Trek. For the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek, Rittenhouse Archives has produced three major trading card sets, plus one boxed set focusing on the 50th Anniversary traveling art exhibition. The fourth and (final planned, at least at the time of this review) 50th Anniversary tribute set from Rittenhouse Archives is the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading card set.

The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading card set is a premium trading card set that focuses on the women of the entire Star Trek franchise. The final 50th Anniversary of Star Trek set is an obvious sequel to the very popular Women Of Star Trek trading card set released back in 2010 with a quality level meant to mimic the premium nature of the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading card set (reviewed here!).

The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading card set is a magnificent set and it is the first set since I started splitting my rating system for trading cards to achieve a perfect score. This is an impressive, beautiful, trading card set and the only (comparatively minor) issue with it is its collectibility. Even with collectibility factored in, this is a near-perfect trading card set. The collector in me (I've been a trading card collector for almost as long as I have been a Star Trek fan) finds it unshakably problematic that with absolutely ideal collation, it would take 30 cases to assemble a true master set - and with this set, there's no cheating through Archive Boxes as the Archive Boxes do not include sketch cards, metal cards, or gold metal cards!

Despite the collecting gripe - a minor one compared to the other two 50th Anniversary sets that had more sketch cards and cut signature cards! - the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading card set is an objectively perfect set that represents the pinnacle of Star Trek collecting!

Basics/Set Composition

"The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary" is a set of high-quality trading cards that feature a sheen to them that makes them look like foil cards for most of the surface of the card. The set focuses exclusively on the women of the Star Trek franchise and expands the autograph set from the 2010 Women Of Star Trek, while introducing a new style of costume card and presenting some incredible sketch cards of the various women of Star Trek! For a television franchise that championed women in positive roles well before the sexual revolution began, the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary treats the women of the franchise right!

Properly assembled, the "The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary" set consists of three hundred seventy-one cards. The set is made up of one hundred common cards and two hundred seventy-one bonus cards, only eleven of which are not available in the actual boxes of "The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary" cards. Boxes of these cards consist of twenty-four packs with five cards per pack and highlighted three autograph cards and one costume card per box.

Common Cards

The common card set of the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading cards consists of one hundred partially-foil cards. These cards were made on a premium card stock and each card features a front that has a high-quality image of the female character and a second image, in a picture window, non-sheen, that features the character paired with another character. The set is oriented entirely in landscape format and features cards for comparatively minor women in the Star Trek franchise - like Shahna, Madeline, and Erika Hernandez - and multiple cards of each of the most important women from the franchise - Uhura, Kira, Janeway, Dax, Crusher, etc. It is hard not to be thrilled with the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary common card set - after studying it, the only change I probably would have made to its composition would have been to swap one of the minor characters (my vote is Madeline!) for a card featuring Ezri Dax and Captain Sisko (the only Ezri card in the set is Ezri Dax and Dr. Bashir).

The backs of the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading cards are well-written and most-frequently focus upon the relationship between the card's primary character and the character they are paired with. So, for example, card 7 details well the relationship Nurse Chapel had with Mr. Spock. Not limited to a single episode or incident, the card follows the many chances Chapel took to express her feelings for Spock and it gives a very complete view of that entire relationship! The cards are very well-written and the stand-outs and cards like 7 where the writers are able to show their mastery of the long arcs for the character, as opposed to simply detailing a one-off character's arc in a single episode. Despite having some limited characters based on their airtime, Rittenhouse Archives did an excellent job at fleshing out minor characters from fan-favorite episodes. As a result, both major women from "The Inner Light" are well-represented with common cards of their own!

This is one of the best-conceived, best-executed common card sets and it is nice to see that for its Star Trek: Voyager component, Kes was not neglected!

Chase Cards

The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading cards have a good balance of bonus cards and for the first time in a few Star Trek sets, there are bonus sets that can be assembled in a single case of cards. The premium quality cards include 271 bonus cards, 260 of which are found in the packs and boxes of the cards. The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary bonus cards include: Metal Parallel Cards, Women In Command, Quotable Women Of Star Trek, Women Of Star Trek Gold Metal, Costume Cards, Autograph Cards, and Sketch cards.

The common card set of Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading cards was replicated as metal cards. This process has become more popular in recent years and the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary common set lends itself beautifully to metal card treatment. The metal cards are found only one per box, so with truly ideal collation, it would take nine cases to complete this subset! The truth, however, is that it is worth it. The metal cards are stylish and carry the images and border from the common set beautifully.

The first unique chase set for the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading cards is the Women In Command chase set. The Women In Command chase set is a set of nine, landscape-oriented cards featuring a minor foil accent in the border that focuses on the influential women of Star Trek when they took command. Rittenhouse Archives aimed for precise with the set and, as a result, Uhura is not featured in the set - she never actually took command of the Enterprise (at best, she had command of a transporter station in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock). Number One from "The Cage" is featured and while it is odd that Saavik is card 9 in the set (chronologically, she should have been card 2), the cards are well-written and nice-looking and the set is comparatively obtainable at one Women In Command card per box.

Also found one per box are one of eighteen Quotable Women Of Star Trek cards. These cards feature a beautiful shot of the character featured on the card (different image on the front than on the back!) and a quote from the woman. The set is a good idea, but here Rittenhouse Archives is somewhat hoisted on its own petard. Rittenhouse Archives has released five different "Quotable" Star Trek sets, with additional "Quotable" cards being used as chase cards in other sets. As a result, Rittenhouse Archives has pretty well mined the franchise for great quotes. So, cards like QW9, which features Deanna Troi, has a quote from Troi that is hardly emblematic of the character. Conversely, it is somewhat shocking that the quotes for Major Kira (which provide some of her fundamental characterization) had not been used before! The Quotable Women set implicitly makes the argument that there is no point in a "Quotable" Star Trek: Enterprise set quite well, though the photography for this chase set is universally high and these cards look nicer than the common "Quotable" cards that made up the five "Quotable" Star Trek sets.

The style and quality of the Quotable Women Of Star Trek chase set is blended with the inherent value and quality of the metal parallel set for the Women Of Star Trek Gold Metal set. The landscape-oriented metal cards feature a big image of each major female character on the left, with a gold secondary image as the background on the right. These are magnificent cards and one of the tragedies of this subset is that fans can never collect this set and get them all signed (the subjects of three of the nineteen cards are now dead). Nineteen is a weird number of cards for a bonus card set, but Rittenhouse Archives makes it feel worthwhile with the quality of the Gold Metal set and the fact that they included Kes instead of culling the set at 18 major female characters.

One per box is a costume card in a new style. The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary cards feature a portrait-oriented costume card style and they succeed in a way that is the opposite of the Quotable Women chase set; Rittenhouse Archives has done an amazing job in the past of representing main castmembers' traditional uniforms in their costume cards. The fifteen primary Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary costume cards feature recognizable and impressive female characters in their non-duty uniform costumes! As a result, Dr. Crusher gets two costume cards from her outfit from Star Trek: Insurrection and Torres has two casual costumes as part of her representation in the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary set. Even fan-coveted T'Pol is given a dual costume card from one of her alternate personas! The costume cards feel fresh and have some very cool variants, like Guinan's hat having noticeable variants and Vash's jacket featuring a number of different colors to her fabric swatch. Even Jennifer Sisko's costume has some cool variants! The costume card set is fleshed out by an exceptionally limited Yeoman Rand costume card that fills in a gap from the prior Women Of Star Trek set!

Each box of Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary had three autograph cards and the complete set featured 68 autograph cards. The autograph cards continued the style begun in the Women Of Star Trek set and featured some incredible signers. Vanessa Williams signed for the first time in the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading card set and Whoopi Goldberg provided an autograph card as well! The Women Of Star Trek set was exceptionally comprehensive for the main cast of women of the franchise - almost every major female cast member from the various Star Trek series's signed an autograph card in the (at that time) new style of autograph card back then. The Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary fills in the gap of Roxanne Dawson, but leaves Nicole de Boer, Linda Park and Jolene Blalock absent from the Women Of Star Trek autograph card format. Despite that, it is hard to denigrate the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary autograph cards as they do include autograph cards from Yvonne Craig, Julie Warner, Susanna Thompson, Sharon Lawrence, Madchen Amick, and Meg Foster! First-time signers like Galyn Gorg and Laura Banks flesh out the set incredibly well, making this a must-collect autograph card set for fans of the larger Star Trek franchise!

One per case, there is a hand-drawn sketch card for the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary. Thirty different artists contributed sketch cards for the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary set and there were some truly magnificent works from artists like Emily Tester and Kris Penix. I was impressed by how familiar sketch card artists Chris Meeks and Warren Martineck - best known for starship and technical sketch cards - adapted to the Women of Star Trek subject matters. Meeks, especially, creates some immaculate works that show he has the ability to render characters with beautiful depth and shading, not just ships! The sketch cards for the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary set are some of the best Rittenhouse Archives has ever presented! The sketch cards may create an issue with the set's collectibility, but tracking down 30 cases to assemble a sketch card set (if one lucks out on the collation!) creates a truly beautiful set!

Non-Box/Pack Cards

Very few of the bonus cards in the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary set cannot be found in the packs and boxes, but some of the ones that are not found in the boxes this time are bound to be the most coveted! There are eleven cards (fourteen, actually) that are not found in the packs and boxes, but because Rittenhouse Archives includes the printing plates as a complete set (which is very much a decent thing to do!), I count them as one card to chase. There are two promotional cards - the general-release P1 card and a P2 card that is exclusive to the manufacturer-released Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary binder. The promo cards follow a format that accurately foreshadows the common cards in the set.

Similarly, there are 2 different casetoppers. The casetoppers are metal replications of the P1 and P2 cards and are found only one per case. Like the standard metal parallel cards, the casetopper metal cards are quite pretty.

In recent years, incentive cards have become incredibly important to collectors and the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary set is no different in that regard. There is a six-case incentive autograph card that continues the Legends Of Star Trek autograph format. For the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary set, the Legends Of Star Trek autograph is a Nichelle Nichols autograph, which is a great tribute to the pioneering actress.

The real drool-worthy component of the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading card set is the 9-case incentive sketch card. Esteemed sketch card artist Charles Hall took the image captured in the picture window portion of each common card and replicated it as a painted art sketch card for the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary. Charles Hall made artwork for these cards that is jaw-dropping good in its quality. Hall picked up subtle background details and included immaculate depth and shading for these sketch cards. They are the true gem of this set and the quality of them is astonishing!

There is an exclusive Women In Command Rittenhouse Rewards cards available for die-hard collectors who exchange wrapper points for the card. The WC10 card features Erika Hernandez from Star Trek: Enterprise. Hernandez is a comparatively minor character and makes for an underwhelming rewards card. There were plenty of other women in command - many of them villains, come to think of it, like Donatra from Star Trek: Nemesis or planetary leaders who might have made an intriguing rewards cards if one had to go with obscure - but the addition of a tenth card to a nine-card set seems pretty superfluous as it is. Despite that, Rittenhouse maintained the quality of the chase set with the reward's card. It is completely Monday Morning Quarterbacking, but as I wrote this, it occurred to me that the Rewards card should have been Captain Tryla Scott. Obscure? Absolutely! But die-hard Trek fans will know that with one-line, she became an essential Woman Of The Star Trek franchise - she is the captain who beat Jim Kirk's record to become the youngest Captain in StarFleet! Furthermore, using her as an incentive card would have been particularly clever as she was a character not utilized anywhere else in the set.

The other four bonus cards are exclusive to the archive box. Found only in the archive box was a Teri Garr autograph card in the Women Of Star Trek format. Also exclusive to the archive box was a WCC27 Seven Of Nine costume card that continued the Women Of Star Trek costume card set, much the way the WCC16 card in the boxes did. Rittenhouse Archives surprised fans with an Archive Box exclusive throwback costume card that they did not announce prior to the set's release! The archive box included a variant WCC11 from the Women Of Star Trek set with a variant fabric swatch from the previously-released version! Also one per box was a set of four printing plates used to make the common cards for the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary set!

Overall

Ultimately, the Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary trading card set is a fitting tribute to its subjects that rewards trading card collectors with a truly impressive set worth tracking down for their collections. If Rittenhouse Archives never does another set focusing on the women of the Star Trek franchise, this is a fitting way to immortalize the heroic women; if Rittenhouse Archives ever revisits women of Star Trek as the subject for a trading card set, it sets the bar impossibly high!

This set culls images from:
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation
The Star Trek Movies
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Voyager
and Star Trek: Enterprise

This is a trading card set I proudly stock in my online store. To collect it, please check out my Women Of Star Trek 50th Anniversary Trading Card Inventory!

10/10 (objective), 8.5/10 (with collectibility factored in)

For other card reviews, be sure to visit my trading card review page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

R.I.P. Roger Moore: The 2017 James Bond Archives - Final Edition Trading Cards Are A Fitting Goodbye.

The Good: Archive box exclusives, Generally good collectibility, Some truly spectacular autograph card signers, Metal cards are neat, Cool relic cards
The Bad: Orientation issues,
The Basics: The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards make a decent trading card set out of an unfortunately bad James Bond film!


Like many people, yesterday I awoke to the sad news that Sir Roger Moore had died. Roger Moore frequently was underrated and undervalued by James Bond fans, which is ironic because Moore had the most "canon" James Bond films under his belt (Never Say Never Again has licensing issues due to its distribution and its authenticity within the James Bond canon is frequently challenged and counting that film only makes a tie for Moore and Sean Connery having equal quantities of James Bond films). Sir Roger Moore was the James Bond whose films I grew up on and because it was the work I had seen him in the most (other Bond actors having effectively branched out from James Bond or came to Bond later in their careers), I most closely associated Roger Moore with James Bond. His death left me saddened and it seemed fitting that the day after he died, completely coincidentally Rittenhouse Archives released its 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards. As the name suggests, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are Rittenhouse Archives's last James Bond trading card set for the foreseeable future (unless they do some form of In Memoriam exclusive set for Roger Moore) and so James Bond fans are saying a lot of "goodbyes" over the last twenty-four hours.

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are actually an incredibly fitting way for fans of the James Bond franchise to say goodbye to Sir Roger Moore, as the trading card set is very heavy in Roger Moore material - the set features four autographed trading cards by Roger Moore and bonus sets from three of Moore's James Bond films - Octopussy, For Your Eyes Only, and A View To A Kill.

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards allow James Bond fans to complete their Rittenhouse Archives James Bond trading card collection with a lot of flair and some truly impressive cards.

Basics/Set Composition

Fully assembled, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set has 387 cards and is essentially four (or five) sets in one. As well, there is an oversized binder produced by Rittenhouse Archives that holds the entire set, with all of its associated chase cards, which has not always been the case for some of the bigger James Bond trading card sets! The set consists of 83 common cards and 304 bonus cards. The chase cards are mostly available in the packs of cards, though eight of them were incentive or promotional cards and could not be found in any of the packs. The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards were released in boxes of twenty-four packs of five cards each.

Common Cards

The common card set for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards consists of eighty-three modern-looking trading cards. The entire common set recaps the plot of Die Another Day (reviewed here!). Sadly, the common set for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are inconsistently oriented. While the backs of every card are portrait-oriented, the fronts of the cards vary between portrait and landscape orientation. That makes the cards something of a pain in the butt to place in the binder as there is no organic way to make the set look good from an orientation point-of-view.

That said, the photograph and writing for the Die Another Day common set in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards is universally wonderful. The 2017 James Bond Archives cards have the traditional UV-resistant coating which is flawlessly applied. The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature a great range of vibrant pictures that have not been overly-promoted (and are different from the shots from the Inkworks Die Another Day set from when the film was theatrically released). Interestingly, Rittenhouse Archives included the image from the promotional card within the common set, which is not a usual thing for their trading card sets. The cards have a fresh look to them that makes it a visually-interesting trading card set. The backs are well-written and the cards detail the plot of Die Another Day quite thoroughly. The writing for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards common set is very entertaining and follows the plot of the film with a lot of detail.

Chase Cards

The 296 chase cards that can be found in packs and boxes of 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition essentially create three additional "common" sets and one bonus parallel set, in addition to more traditional James Bond chase cards. As is the habit in many of the newer trading card releases, there are no bonus card sets that can be completed with even a single case of trading cards; most require at least two cases with ideal collation to assemble the chase sets. The higher-end sets require three to six cases to complete.

The 2017 James Bond Archives trading card set features three extensive bonus sets that require multiple cases to complete. There are retro sets that retell the stories of For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View To A Kill with 36, 32, and 30 cards each. The retro sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards illustrate an overall problem with the way Rittenhouse Archives approached their throwback sets (as a holistic collecting issue). Prior retro Throwback sets had up to 102 cards and the detailing on the plot of each movie was as detailed as for the common sets, the films for which Rittenhouse Archives was able to yield less material made for smaller sets. The three retro throwback sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are well-written, though they have somewhat more condensed plotting than the common sets (the Octopussy set, for example, devotes a single card to the teaser mission whereas the Die Another Day common set has eight cards for the mission that came before the opening credits in that film!). Rittenhouse Archives did the best they could with the material they were able to cull from the three films in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards, but James Bond trading card collectors are likely to feel like they are getting less for their money on the throwback sets in the Final Edition cards. If Rittenhouse Archives had produced all of the throwback sets at the same time and more evenly distributed them through the last six Archives releases, the throwback sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards would not have been so anemic by the numbers.

That said, the photograph and the writing for the throwback sets maintains the high standards of quality that the other retro sets have embodied. The throwback sets, like many of the prior Throwback retro sets are inconsistently oriented and are more problematic to try to put into binder pages in any sensible way. All three of the Throwback sets in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are made of a more retro cardboard stock to make the cards from the older films seem like they were from the period in which the films were released. The For Your Eyes Only and A View To A Kill sets features black and white photography on some of the card backs, but this is nowhere near as problematic as the Throwback sets for the color films that have black and white images on the fronts.

Two per box there are gold parallel cards for the Die Another Day set. The gold parallel set was limited to only 250 of each of the cards. The gold parallel cards are a particularly boring parallel card; they are distinguished from the common versions of their cards by limited gold foil lettering for the title on the front of each card and an individual foil-stamped number on the back, at the bottom of the card. While they are substantively similar to prior James Bond parallel cards, the parallel cards lack any real flash quality to them.

As part of finishing the James Bond trading card line, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature 24 SPECTRE and Skyfall Expansion cards. Found one per box, the twenty-four Expansion cards continue the common card sets from prior releases as bonus cards. The 9 SPECTRE cards for The Complete James Bond come together to form the movie poster for SPECTRE on the back, just like every nine-cards in the common set did. The other fifteen Expansion cards extend the Heroes & Villains, Bond Girls Are Forever, Bond Villains and James Bond Archives sets from prior releases with content from SPECTRE and Skyfall, perfectly continuing those sets and concluding them in a fashion consistent to the original releases.

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards concluded the 007 Double-Sided (Mirror Cards) card set that was begun early in 2016. The eight cards found in this subset in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards work together with cards found in the two prior sets to create a 24-card bonus card set. These beautiful trading cards feature the incarnation of James Bond on one side and the primary villain on the obverse for each of the James Bond films. The eight cards in the 007 Double-Sided set found in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are every three Bond films starting with the third M3,M6, M9, etc. While this might create a weird ultimate collation the cards themselves are stunning and cleanly printed on a vibrant-looking mirror board that is very fresh looking.

Also found only two per case are two of the twelve Metal cards for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards. Featuring the movie posters for each of the last twelve James Bond films, the Metal cards are individually numbered on the back and they concluded a very cool set that was begun in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards. Rittenhouse Archives has recently gotten into metal card production and the metal cards in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards reinforces the argument that Rittenhouse Archives knows exactly what it is doing with that technology!

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature fifteen Relic cards, split between fairly traditional costume cards (albeit in an uncommon portrait orientation) and relic cards of James Bond props. Rather cooly, the Relic card set features a dual relic card with prop materials from two different props from Quantum Of Solace. The costume cards are limited to 200 each and they are pretty typical costume pieces - James Bond suits, a top from a Bond girl and a supporting character or two's costume pieces. Unlike something like a Star Trek costume that has a variety of fabrics or colors, the James Bond costume cards with costume materials from Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace and Skyfall have fabric swatches that are very consistent and unimaginative. Fortunately, the rarer relic cards are much more variable and intriguing for card collectors and James Bond fans.

As with most media-based trading card sets, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards feature autographed trading cards. This set of trading cards features a whopping fifty-six autograph cards, which includes awesome autographed materials like autographed costume cards and a gold signature card. The bulk of the autograph cards in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set are split between the familiar format of the 40th Anniversary set – which had very small pictures of the character’s head and were oriented in a landscape format – a single Women Of Bond autograph card and the vastly more popular full-bleed style which was portrait oriented with giant images of the characters and a minimal signing space at the bottom. The seven 40th Anniversary style autographs are highlighted by autographs by three different Roger Moore autographs and one extremely limited Daniel Craig autograph. I was pretty psyched that Ben Whishaw signed another card for this set.

In the full-bleed autographs, the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards Rittenhouse Archives included one of the most incredible autograph line ups of all Rittenhouse Archives James Bond card set releases. In addition to a full-bleed Roger Moore autograph, there is yet another George Lazenby signature card. Rittenhouse Archives included first-time signer Tula alongside highly-coveted celebrities like Judi Dench, Halle Berry, Dave Bautista, Michelle Yeoh, Berenice Marlohe, Lea Sedoux, and Jeffrey Wright. Rather impressively, Rittenhouse Archives had held an incredible autograph card from fan-favorite villain Jaws portrayed by Richard Kiel before he died, which they released in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards. Most of the autograph cards in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards are from recognizable actors and characters from the James Bond films. This is one of nicest-looking autograph card sets for James Bond trading cards that Rittenhouse Archives has ever produced.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set has eight cards not found in any of the boxes or packs. There are three promotional cards – the usual general release, an exclusive one that Rittenhouse Archives is distributing at conventions, and the binder-exclusive promotional card.

The casetopper for the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading card set is a pretty cool Die Another Day movie poster metal card. The Die Another Day variant movie poster cards are not individually numbered, but it is a metal card and it features artwork from the most recognizable movie poster for the film.

Then there are the incentive cards and they are split between the average and the incredible. For every six-cases ordered, collectors of the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards received a Gold Signature Maud Adams as Octopussy autograph card. This card, predictably, looks amazing, though the value of it is not likely to be on part with prior 6-case incentive cards. The nine-case incentive card is an absolutely wonderful Christopher Lee full-bleed autograph card, posthumously released. This Scaramanga autograph card might well be the rarest Christopher Lee autograph card from Rittenhouse Archives and they look incredible!

The final two cards in the 2017 James Bond Archives set were exclusive to the Archive Box. Filling in one of the gaps in the Women Of Bond autograph card set is a Yvonne Shima autograph that was released as an exclusive. As well, Rittenhouse Archives released a true grail card in the form of a Sean Connery cut signature card, which could only be found in the Archive Box. The cut signature cards - the ones I've seen - look absolutely amazing with vibrant, clear signatures from Connery and they represent the only Sean Connery James Bond autograph card from Rittenhouse Archives.

Overall

The 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards might not be flawless, but they are a fitting tribute to Roger Moore and the final James Bond films that Rittenhouse Archives had yet to make card sets for. Collectors will want to hunt down everything they can from this set as it closes the book on James Bond - at least for the time - with a very high level of quality.

This set culls images from the James bond films Die Another Day, Octopussy (reviewed here!), For Your Eyes Only (reviewed here!) and A View To A Kill (reviewed here!)!

These cards are available in my online store! Please check them out here: 2017 James Bond Archives - Final Edition Trading Card Current Inventory!

For other James Bond trading card reviews, please check out my reviews of:
2009 James Bond Archives
2015 James Bond Archives
2016 James Bond Classics
2016 James Bond Archives - SPECTRE Edition

8/10

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Better Than The Film Upon Which They Are Based: The 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition Trading Cards!

The Good: Not prohibitive to collect, Some truly spectacular autograph card signers, Metal cards are neat, Cool relic cards
The Bad: Orientation issues, A lot of familiar autograph signers
The Basics: The 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards make a decent trading card set out of an unfortunately bad James Bond film!


When it comes to James Bond trading cards, the trading card manufacturers are, unfortunately, limited by the material. While the James Bond film franchise has an astonishingly large international following, objectively viewed, the movies in the franchise are not all winners. I have a very mixed relationship with the films in the James Bond franchise and the last two films in the franchise have worked in defiance of the most sensible interpretation of the franchise: that James Bond is a code name, an alias, used by MI-6 spies and that the CIA has similarly-protected agents. So, when Rittenhouse Archives announced they were producing the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards, I did not have as much anticipation in the product as many of the die-hard fans.

As one might expect, the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards were produced in 2016 by Rittenhouse Archives, one of the biggest producers of non-sport trading cards in the industry, as one of two James Bond trading card releases for 2016. For the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition cards, Rittenhouse went with a retro look and feel for a couple of the chase sets, following in the tradition and concept of the 2014 James Bond Archives trading cards.

Rather impressively, the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards manage to take a mediocre subject and make a very cool trading card set!

Basics/Set Composition

Fully assembled, the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading card set has 437 cards and is essentially four (or six) sets in one. As well, there is an oversized binder produced by Rittenhouse Archives that actually manages to hold the entire set, with all of its associated chase cards! The set consists of 76 common cards and 361 bonus cards. The chase cards are mostly available in the packs of cards, though seven of them were incentive or promotional cards and could not be found in any of the packs. The 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards were released in boxes of twenty-four packs of five cards each.

Common Cards

The common card set for the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards consists of seventy-six modern-looking trading cards. The entire common set recaps the plot of SPECTRE (reviewed here!). One of the wonderful aspects of the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading card common card set is that the cards are consistently oriented. With a nice footer with the movie's title, all of th cards in the common set are landscape oriented to make for a nicely consistent trading card set.

The 2016 James Bond Archives cards have the traditional UV-resistant coating which is flawlessly applied. Regardless of the content of the film, the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards feature a great range of vibrant pictures that have not been overly-promoted. The cards have a fresh look to them that makes it a visually-interesting trading card set. The backs are well-written and the cards detail the plot of SPECTRE quite thoroughly.

Chase Cards

The 354 chase cards that can be found in packs and boxes of 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition essentially create three additional "common" sets and two bonus parallel sets, in addition to more traditional James Bond chase cards. As is the habit in many of the newer trading card releases, there are no bonus card sets that can be completed with even a single case of trading cards; most require three to six cases to assemble the chase sets.

The 2016 James Bond Archives trading card set features three extensive bonus sets that require multiple cases to complete. There are retro sets that retell the stories of Diamonds Are Forever, Moonraker and The Living Daylights with 48, 61, and 55 cards each. Given that past retro sets have had as many as 102 trading cards, there is the comparative feeling in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards that Rittenhouse Archives is running out of substantive material for the retro sets. The throwback sets, like many of the prior Throwback retro sets are inconsistently oriented and are more problematic to try to put into binder pages in any sensible way. The Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker throwback sets are made of a more retro cardboard stock to make the cards from the older films seem like they were from the period in which the films were released. The Diamonds Are Forever set features black and white photography, which is odd because the film is in color. Perhaps even more irksome, though, is the fact that both the Moonraker and The Living Daylights cards are predominantly in color, but feature a handful of random cards in each set that are black and white.

One per box there are gold parallel cards for the SPECTRE and The Living Daylights sets. Each of those sets were limited to only 100 (for SPECTRE) and 125 (for The Living Daylights) of each of the cards. The gold parallel cards are a particularly boring parallel card; they are distinguished from the common versions of their cards by limited gold foil lettering on the front of each card and an individual foil-stamped number on the back, at the bottom of the card. While they are substantively similar to prior James Bond parallel cards, the parallel cards lack any real flash quality to them.

The 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards continued the 007 Double-Sided (Mirror Cards) card set that was begun early in 2016. The eight cards found in this subset in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards work together with cards found in an earlier and a subsequent set to create a 24-card bonus card set. These beautiful trading cards feature the incarnation of James Bond on one side and the primary villain on the obverse for each of the James Bond films. The eight cards in the 007 Double-Sided set found in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards are every three Bond films starting with the second M2,M5, M8, etc. While this might create a weird ultimate collation the cards themselves are stunning and cleanly printed on a vibrant-looking mirror board that is very fresh looking.

Also found only two per case are two of the twelve Metal cards for the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards. Featuring the movie posters for each of the first twelve James Bond films, the Metal cards are individually numbered on the back and they begin a very coolset that will be completed in the 2017 James Bond 007 Archives - Final Edition trading cards. Rittenhouse Archives has recently gotten into metal card production and the metal cards in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards makes well the argument that Rittenhouse Archives knows exactly what it is doing with that technology!

The 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards feature thirteen Relic cards, split between fairly traditional costume cards (albeit in an uncommon portrait orientation) and relic cards of James Bond props. The most rare of these is a Russian Atomic Energy Badge (MR6) that features a chopped up badge prop that yielded 125 trading cards in a very neat shadowbox style! The costume cards are limited to 200 each and they are pretty typical costume pieces - James Bond suits, dresses from Bond girls and a supporting character or two's costume pieces. Unlike something like a Star Trek costume that has a variety of fabrics or colors, the James Bond costume cards with costume materials from Quantum Of Solace and Skyfall have fabric swatches that are very consistent and unimaginative. Fortunately, the rarer relic cards are much more variable and intriguing for card collectors and James Bond fans.

As with most media-based trading card sets, the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards feature autographed trading cards. This set of trading cards features only twenty-six autograph cards, which is a significant step down in numbers from the prior few James Bond sets. Autograph cards in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading card set are split between the familiar format of the 40th Anniversary set – which had very small pictures of the character’s head and were oriented in a landscape format – and the vastly more popular full-bleed style which was portrait oriented with giant images of the characters and a minimal signing space at the bottom. The eight 40th Anniversary style autographs are highlighted by autographs by Jeffrey Wright and Daniela Bianchi. The rest are signers who have either signed plenty of cards before or had comparatively minor background roles in James Bond films (four of the six do not even have character names with actual names - i.e. "Drax's Woman").

In the full-bleed autographs, the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards Rittenhouse Archives made an uncommon and audacious decision to include only a single autograph by an actor who played James Bond. The Roger Moore autograph in the set is one of the more common Moore autographs, but it's nice to see at least one Bond autograph in the set. The The Living Daylights bonus set in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards unfortunately highlights the fact that Timothy Dalton has not signed cards for Rittenhouse Archives's James Bond trading cards. Instead of rehashing multiple Bonds or previously-done signers, the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards has full-bleed autographs of Dave Bautista, a gorgeous autograph card for SPECTRE star Lea Seydoux, a cool Sheena Easton signature card, and another for Dolph Lundgren. Returning autograph signers were of a fairly high caliber with Teri Hatcher, Jane Seymour and Caroline Munro signing new autograph cards for the set. Even the comparatively minor signers in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards have beautiful cards and crisp and nice signatures on them. The autograph cards in the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards have remarkably good collation with none of the autographs being particularly prohibitive to find.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

The 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading card set has seven cards not found in any of the boxes or packs. There are three promotional cards – the usual general release, an exclusive one to Non-Sport Update magazine, and the binder-exclusive promotional card.

The casetopper for the 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading card set is a fairly bland SPECTRE movie poster card, which continues the downward trend of casetopper cards (they used to be cool autograph, sketch or autographed costume cards!). The SPECTRE cards are not individually numbered, foil or even sealed into their toploaders!

Then there are the incentive cards and these again seem more subtle than prior, flashy, incentive cards. For purchasing six cases, dealers received a dual autograph card of Aliza Gur and Martine Beswick from From Russia With Love. This is an unfortunately obscure and unremarkable dual autograph card and does not hold anything near the value of dual autographs like the Richard Keil/Roger Moore dual autograph that was previously released. For buying nine cases, dealers were given a Jonathan Pryce autographed costume card. That card is, admittedly, very cool.

The final card in the 2016 James Bond Archives set is the Archive Box exclusive Clifton James full-bleed autograph card. Sadly, the unfortunate and most profound commentary that can be made on the unremarkable nature of this card is that despite its comparative rarity and its general quality, when Mr. James died recently, it did not affect at all the value of the card in the secondary market. While Rittenhouse Archives wants to be able to sell far more than just the Archive Boxes (the metal cards alone pretty much guaranteed the cases would sell without the Archive Box incentives), the Clifton James incentive autograph was a particularly lackluster benefit for those who tracked down or bought in enough volume to be granted an archive box.

Overall

The 2016 James Bond 007 Archives - SPECTRE Edition trading cards make SPECTRE a more fun and collectible trading card incarnation than it was a blockbuster film, but its best parts are the chase sets that require other trading card sets to complete.

This set culls images from the James bond films SPECTRE, Moonraker (reviewed here!), Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here!) and The Living Daylights (reviewed here!)!

These cards are available in my online store! Please check them out here: 2016 James Bond Archives - SPECTRE Edition Trading Card Current Inventory!

For other James Bond trading card reviews, please check out my reviews of:
2009 James Bond Archives
2015 James Bond Archives
2016 James Bond Classics

7/10

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Against My Original Standards, I Fall In Love With The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary Trading Cards!

The Good: Awesome sketches, Very cool bonus cards, Neat common cards, Quality of cards
The Bad: Collectibility, One less impressive bonus card set, A few obscure autograph signers
The Basics: The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary may be a bear to collect, but the end result is a pretty fabulous trading card set!


It seems like the last ten years have just flown by for me. Ten years ago, the Star Trek trading card market underwent a fundamental shift from which it could never turn back: the trading card hobby became the trading card industry. I adequately kvetched about that when I reviewed the set that destroyed collecting once and for all with the Star Trek 40th Anniversary Series 2 trading card set (reviewed here!). Since then, the bar has been raised several times for Star Trek trading card collectors and when there has been even a shift toward the way card sets used to be, the set released has not performed nearly as well in the marketplace. Go figure; I guess most collectors actually want the impossible find!

So, last year, when Rittenhouse Archives produced their Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading card set as a premium trading card release, I vowed not to simply complain about how uncollectible the cards were. I found my happy medium last month when I reviewed the Rogue One: Mission Briefing trading cards (reviewed here!) and I decided to review the product with dual ratings; the substance of the set and separately with "collectibility" factored in. It is with that new sense of standards that I sat down to review the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading card set.

And WOW! The substance of the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary set is amazing. For the money, the set is a bit small (a true master set only has 359 cards), but the content is absolutely incredible!

Basics/Set Composition

The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary set was a set of trading cards produced by Rittenhouse Archives to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Original Series, instead of doing season by season celebrations of the 50th Anniversary. Boxes of the TOS 50th Anniversary cards contained only twelve packs with five cards per pack. One does not get a lot per box and the only guarantees are one common set and two autographs per box. One of the decent aspects of the Rittenhouse guarantee for this product is that one is guaranteed one of each of the two different autograph types on a box. Unfortunately for those trying to collect the set, there is not a single chase set that can be completed with even a single case of these cards!

The common set traverses the entire 80-episodes of Star Trek. The chase cards are focused largely on "The Cage" and "Mirror, Mirror" with generic crew cards and production artwork cards thrown in. The set has a beautiful tribute set to the late Leonard Nimoy (still nothing for Grace Lee Whitney, who also died since the last Original Series set!), a diverse array of autograph cards and sketch cards that are actually very dud-free. The element that makes the set virtually impossible to complete, though, are the 3 cut signature cards that made the cases a sell-out at the manufacturer's level and left a few very determined collectors hunting them down!

The TOS 50th Anniversary set consists of 359 cards. The 359 card set consists of 80 common cards and two hundred seventy-nine chase cards, eleven of which cannot be found in the packs or boxes.

Common Cards

The 80 card common set of TOS 50th Anniversary cards are a fairly cool design (though I still have not figured out how the form fits into the theme of the set/show). The common cards are die-cut so they have indents in the centers of the sides, top, and bottom. The corners are not squared; they have beveled edges. As a result, each card is a 14-sided (?,!) trading card with a text block at the top and one at the bottom that makes it vaguely resemble the viewscreen on the Enterprise bridge. Each card has gold foil borders around each of the four pictures on the front and a gold foil center that features the Star Trek 50th Anniversary symbol.

The common card set for the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary is another set that makes an episode by episode journey through all of the episodes of the original Star Trek. The twist on the familiar subject - other than the physical form of the cards - is that the backs are written as if they were Spock's logs about the plot of the episode. Spock makes perfect sense as the "writer" of the mission logs as he is the only character to appear in each episode and it avoids narrative hassles like "which version of Captain Kirk made the log for 'The Enemy Within' or 'Turnabout Intruder?'"

The writing on the cards is fun and done at a consistently high level of quality. The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary are written to sufficiently capture Spock's sense of humor and observations on humanity, while adequately telling the story of each episode of Star Trek.

The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary cards feature bright, beautifully-crisp images on each card. The four pictures on the front of each card tend to be different from shots used in prior sets, which is a nice thing. The photogaphy on the front of the cards also finds the right balance of character images without neglecting the special effect shots. The result is a structurally-weird looking common set that actually serves as a fitting tribute to the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek!

Chase Cards

The TOS 50th Anniversary set has two hundred seventy-nine chase cards, of which two hundred sixty-eight are available in the right packs! Some of those cards, though, are statistically improbable for a collector to pull from the packs or boxes. Ironically, there are some sketch card artists whose works are more rare than the Jill Ireland cut signature card that was pack-inserted!

The first level of chase sets are two expansion sets that explore "The Cage" and "Mirror, Mirror." Cards in each of these sets are found only two per box, which means that they take three cases to assemble each set (assuming one does not pull duplicates!). These two chase sets are substantive and incredible. The "Mirror, Mirror" cards feature foilboard borders that are shiny and distinctive. The "The Cage" bonus cards have neat purple borders and a thin gold border around the image on the card, which makes it look like one is using one of the Talosian's viewscreens to look in on the episode! These chase sets are reminiscent of the James Bond retro "throwback" sets that Rittenhouse Archives has produced for some of the older James Bond films. The result is essentially a flashy additional "common" set for two of the best episodes of Star Trek and it's hard not to gush over just how pretty the "The Cage" cards actually are!

Interestingly, Rittenhouse Archives continues to state the odds of its chase cards in terms of packs. I find this interesting because, especially in the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading cards, the odds for most of the bonus cards are more reasonably stated in terms of boxes or even cases! The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary two chase sets where their components are found one in every four boxes and three that have only a single card from the set in a case!

The Bridge Crew Hero cards are landscape-oriented acetate trading cards featuring the seven core Star Trek characters, plus Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand. The Bridge Crew Hero cards look good, but I found myself split on them. The rarity of the cards is high, the content is hardly audacious and as an avid convention-goer, the Bridge Crew Hero cards are another set that is unfortunate in its timing. This is yet another set that fans cannot use to get autographed by the stars of Star Trek. For sure, the four cast members featured who are still alive and represented in this set could make thes cards look amazing by signing them in gold, but it's a set one could never possibly get completely signed and that's sad. While that is not an inherent problem with the Star Trek cards themselves, whenever Rittenhouse Archives makes a new-looking, cool card like this, it is hard not to look at them and consider the alternative use for them! That said, the acetate cards are clean and crisp and look very good.

Also one in every four boxes is one of the nine U.S.S. Enterprise Concept Art cards. Rittenhouse Archives managed to get the original production artwork that pitched various looks (and feels!) of the U.S.S. Enterprise before the first shooting model was ever made. These cards might be the low point of the set; they are gold-bordered and brown and do not look overly distinctive (the back of each card is, essentially, a visual checklist of the set). Sadly, the designer of the U.S.S. Enterprise is dead, which prevented Rittenhouse Archives from using behind-the-scenes interviews on why each of the concept sketches for the Enterprise was rejected. For an unfortunately unremarkable chase set, the rarity of these cards is vastly disproportionate to their value.

One per case is a "Mirror, Mirror" card. Reminiscent of the mirrorboard cards made popular in the Star Trek Season 2 trading card set (reviewed here!), each of the cards in this subset feature big pictures of the main cast, Marlena, and the Enterprise. On one side of each card is an image of the regular universe version of the character, the obverse has the Mirror Universe version. These high-quality cards are a great alternative to the Season 2 Mirror, Mirror set at a more affordable price point!

Also one per case is one of the nine Leonard Nimoy Tribute cards. Since Rittenhouse Archives started producing trading cards, they have made Tribute cards to the now-deceased stars of Star Trek: DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and Majel Barret. The Leonard Nimoy Tribute cards are the first ones in the set that have been included in the packs (previously, they were casetoppers and there were only 3!). The standard trading card-sized Tribute cards are individually hand-numbered on the front out of 125 and feature bright, distinct images of Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek (no shots from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Star Trek films or his Spock Prime role from the new film universe). The tribute to Nimoy is a fitting one and this is one of the nicest all-Spock sets ever assembled!

Like most modern Star Trek sets, the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading cards feature autograph cards. Found one per box is a Silver Series autograph card and one "Black" autograph. The "Black" autographs are the same format as the Bridge Crew autographs from the Star Trek Portfolio Prints trading cards (reviewed here!). The "Black" autographs feature a much wider range of characters than the initial bridge crew run - performers like Sany Gimple, Michael Dante, and the grail Teri Garr! The Silver Series autographs are an incredibly popular, landscape-oriented autograph card with a single characrter image and the autograph - signed in silver ink - over a black starfield. The Silver Series Autographs feature the likes of William Shatner, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Walter Koenig before going into the significant (and a few unfortunately indistinct) guest stars. The set has a Joan Collins autograph card and autographs from the now-deceased Grace Lee Whitney and Yvonne Craig. Regardless of the occasionally mundane subjects on the cards, all of the Silver Series autographs look incredible! Rittenhouse Archives assembled an impressive list of signers for the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading card set!

The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading cards also featured sketch cards found only one per case. The sketch cards in the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary were beautiful and there is something to the overall value of the set when one of the most common sketches comes from the acclaimed artists Mick and Matt Glebe! The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary features sketch cards from 42 different artists, with only 8 of them being done by artists who produced less than 25 sketches for the set. I have yet to see a lousy sketch from this set, with truly amazing works from Sean Pence, Kirsten Allen, Helga Wojik, and Melike Acar! Rittenhouse Archives advertised the set as featuring the best-yet sketch cards and they absolutely delivered!

Finally, found about one in every eighteen CASES was one of three Star Trek cut signature autograph cards. Rittenhouse Archives managed to get their hands on authenticated autographs from the long-deceased Jeffrey Hunter, Susan Oliver and Jill Ireland. Ireland's material is the most plentiful, while Hunter's cut signature autograph cards are now the rarest Rittenhouse has produced for a Star Trek set. The cut signature cards for the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary might be virtually impossible to find, but they look amazing!

Non-Box/Pack Cards

There are eleven cards that cannot be found no matter how many packs one opens. These include the regular P1 promotional card, which is easily available in the secondary market, as well as the P2 promotional card which was exclusive to the Rittenhouse-produced binder. The two promotional cards are distinctive from the other cards by being heavily-embossed, gold foil cards that advertise the Star Trek 50th Anniversary!

One per case, there is an alternate version of the common card #40. The 40a Casetopper card is a "Mirror, Mirror" card that features different images and alternate text from the common card. The 40a is written as it if were from the perspective of the Mirror Universe Spock and they look cool. Having had casetoppers that were once autograph, autographed-costume, sketch or dual-autograph cards, it is hard to get truly psyched about an "alternate common" card as the Casetopper.

For every six cases purchased, Rittenhouse Archives gave dealers a Silver Series Leonard Nimoy autograph card. If the casetopper is lackluster, the six-case incentive is absolutely incredible! Featuring artwork of Nimoy as the Mirror Universe Spock, the 6-case incentive autograph from the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary matches the quality of the other silver series autographs and has much higher inherent value to it!

For every nine cases purchased, dealers were granted a Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary William Shatner/Leonard Nimoy Dual Autograph card! The dual autograph for this set is similar to the Shatner/Nimoy Dual Autograph from the Star Trek Portfolio Prints trading card set. Where that incentive card featured Kirk and Spock in their Mirror Universe garb (and, in Spock's case, facial hair), the Dual Autograph for the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary features a traditional promotional photo of the Captain and First Officer. Oddly, its value has been depressed since the cards were released in the secondary market, but this card is poised to explode in value given the more universal appeal of the traditional appearance of Kirk and Spock.

Finally, there are the Archive Box exclusive cards. Rittenhouse Archives expanded the SkyBox "Mirror, Mirror" trading card set with an Archive Box exclusive M8 card of Marlena Moreau! Because Charendoff designed the original "Mirror, Mirror" card back in 1998, the new card exactly matches the style and quality of the prior release!

Rittenhouse Archives also included a set of printing plates in each Archive Box and it is hard not to give the company a huge amount of credit for the way they released them. Some trading card companies release the printing plates in the packs and collectors have to desperately attempt to cobble together one of four possible printing plate sets to achieve a true master set. Rittenhouse Archives takes a different approach and it is far more humane to collectors! The Archive Box includes one set of all four printing plates used to make a single common card (and the casetopper!), so collectors get a set of printing plates as opposed to trying to reconstruct a whole set of cards in printing plate form.

For the serious collectors, there is a Rittenhouse Rewards card as well, the E10 expansion card that makes the 9-card Enterprise Concept Art card set into a 10-card set. Available only through redeeming points from wrappers, the E10 features the familiar version of the U.S.S. Enterprise, which is a cool way to cap off the lackluster subset.

Overall

The Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading cards are well-organized, look amazing and make a potentially stale subject feel remarkably fresh again. While the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading card set is a fairly small trading card set for the price one would pay attempting to assemble it, it is a true celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek. Those who are not obsessed with creating a master set will still find ample material to gleefully collect in the Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary trading card set!

This set culls images from Star Trek, which is reviewed here!

These cards are available in my online store! Please check out my growing Star Trek The Original Series 50th Anniversary Trading Card Inventory!

For other original Star Trek trading card sets reviewed by me, please check out:
Star Trek - Season 1 Episode Collection trading cards
Star Trek - Season 3 Episode Collection trading cards
Star Trek In Motion
35th Anniversary HoloFEX Holofoil cards
Legends Of Captain James T. Kirk
The Art And Images Of Star Trek
Legends Of Spock
"Quotable" Star Trek
Legends Of Dr. Leonard McCoy
Legends Of Scotty, Sulu And Uhura
Legends Of Chekov, Chapel And Rand
Star Trek 40th Anniversary Season 2
Star Trek (2009 movie) cards
Star Trek Heroes & Villains

8.5/10 (substance/content)
2/10 (factoring collectibility)

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Awesome And Excessive, Rogue One Mission Briefing Trading Cards Split My Standards!

The Good: Good overview of the time period in the Star Wars universe, Some cool autograph signers, Cool Rogue One teases
The Bad: Ridiculous numbers of parallel cards, Insane rarities on a wide variety of cards, A weird card choices, Sticker autograph card style.
The Basics: Leading up to the cinematic release of Rogue One, Topps produced the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards which are interesting-enough, but absolutely impossible to collect.


Every now and then, I encounter a product that forces me to re-evaluate how I rate various products. Sometimes, there is a film where I find myself literally caught between a 2/10 and an 8/10, usually when something that is nauseatingly horrific, but I have to acknowledge that it is done well. With trading cards, I find myself occasionally trapped because "collectibility" is one of the standards by which I rate a trading card set. In recent times, many trading card sets have become prohibitive to even attempt to collect the set. Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards from Topps are one such set. Given that there are at least 184 unique - 1/1 cards - not counting the printing plates (!) the Rogue One Mission Briefing are impossible to collect. Literally, the moment any two collectors actually committed to trying to collect this set, it became absolutely impossible to make a true, complete master set of the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards.

That said, when I started opening packs, boxes and cases of Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards, I found there was actually quite a bit to like about the card set. Outside the weird volume of hard-to-assemble parallel sets, the content in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card set is actually pretty cool. The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards blend key Star Wars prequel events with animated series moments with the highlights - usually concerned with the first and second Death Stars - of the original Star Wars Trilogy . . . with teases of Rogue One.

Basics/Set Composition

Topps has begun to be an active part of building hype for the new Star Wars movies by creating transitional trading card sets that connect the new works to the classic Star Wars films. Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards are one such set and it does its best to capitalize on the connections between classic Star Wars works and Rogue One.

The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards are dominated by a retro cardboard cardstock for the bulk of the cards. Chase cards like the sticker cards, autograph cards, foil cards and printing plates have a different sheen and feel to their fronts, but most of the trading cards in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards have a retro cardboard look and feel, which goes back to the original Topps Star Wars trading card releases from the late 1970s. While all of the common cards (and most of the chase) are formatted in one orientation (landscape), the text on the back of the cards is (unfortunately) oriented the same way as the text on the front. As a result, when one flips a page in the binder, they must rotate the binder around in order to read the backs. This is not very friendly to those who want to sit and read the cards.

The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards could be compiled to make a single, true master set of 1583 trading cards. Most of the cards in the true master set would be chase parallel cards and the set is prohibitive to collect because of some of the odds of ever finding the rarest cards, which were truly unique 1/1 individually numbered parallel cards. Boxes of the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards contain only twenty-four packs of eight cards each. Topps, Inc. only guaranteed two “hits” per box. In my experience, that meant that each box had a patch card and then an autograph, sketch or printing plate card; there were three boxes in my case that had parallel cards that were part of the individually-numbered sets.

Common Cards

The Rogue One Mission Briefing common set is an interesting concept that loses a little bit of focus near its end. The 110 card set focuses in a general way on the elements that went into the creation and destruction of the Death Star. The first 68 of 110 cards transition from the Star Wars prequel films to events in A New Hope that focus on the Death Star. Cards 69 through 78 do a fast gloss-over of The Empire Strikes Back and the destruction of the second Death Star in Return Of The Jedi before going into character cards. The common set ends with ten cards focusing on events and characters from Rogue One.

The common card set is generally well-written, though some of the cards are weird stretches that seem designed entirely to sell the rest of the set. Chief among these are cards in the character portion of the common set like card 90 - John D. Branon (Red Four). Topps managed to track down the random actor who appeared for a few frames in A New Hope who played the Red Four X-Wing pilot. The actor is Jack Klaff, who actually was credited in A New Hope, which was his first film, who had perhaps thirty seconds of screentime (including where he was in the background). Card 90 fleshes out the briefly-seen character with a full backstory, arguably to build enthusiasm for an autograph card where one's first instinct upon seeing it would be to wonder "Who is this?!" The nine-card mural, with a final card showing what the mural is supposed to look like assembled, help infuse the Rogue One Mission Briefing common card set with actual material from Rogue One.

As for the images, the Rogue One Mission Briefing, most of the shots are from the films and the animated television shows, no promotional shots. Interestingly, astute fans of the Star Wars films will recognize the ten shots from the final cards in the common set all from the trailer from Rogue One. These are hardly ambitious images from Rogue One, but they are the shots that Topps had in advance of the film's release.

Chase Cards

The Rogue One Mission Briefing cards are loaded with bonus cards. The bonus cards range from various levels of parallel cards to basic chase cards like Death Star, Heroes, Villains, and Rogue One character cards, as well as higher level chase cards like patch, autograph, and printing plate cards. There are 1473 chase cards in the Rogue One Mission Briefing set, with only ten that are not found in the packs and boxes of the cards.

Most packs of Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards contain two parallel cards, though there are six different parallel sets. The six parallel sets replicate the common card set with different border colors. The common set has a retro look to it, with a red border around the big image of the card's subject. The parallel cards replace the red border with "Death Star Black," green, or blue borders. For the three rarer sets, the red border is replaced with a sickly blue-gray (the backs are individually numbered out of 100), gold - which actually looks orange and is individually numbered out of 50 - and orange, which are unique 1/1 parallel cards. There is nothing particularly special about these parallel cards, save their collectibility, though the black parallel cards actually look pretty awesome. It's funny that they are the most common of the parallel cards.

There are a number of fairly common bonus cards - whose sets take about three boxes to complete - in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards. Found one in every eight packs are Rogue One foil cards, Heroes Of The Rebel Alliance, and Villains Of The Galactic Empire cards. A little more common are the Rogue One comic strip cards and Death Star cards; found two per box are Darth Vader Continuity cards and the sticker cards. Only the Death Star cards are in landscape format, like the common cards; the rest are all in portrait orientation. Rather wisely, the Heroes and Villains chase sets do not bother with real text on the back; fans already know who these characters are. The sticker cards feature mediocre artwork of characters in sepia tones on a blue background and decent artwork of the various ships from Rogue One. The Death Star cards are neat in that they include some weird, obscure shots of various interiors of the Death Star, while the character foils do a decent job of blending the promotional images of Rogue One characters with generic foil backgrounds. The only real issues I found with the basic chase cards are that some of the Darth Vader continuity cards and Darth Vader-themed character cards are virtually identical, with one having to look at the back of the card to determine which card they are looking at!

One per box of the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards is one of nine Rogue One Montage cards. The Montage cards are a truly nice replicated artwork card of the new characters from Rogue One. These include very cool artwork cards of Jyn Erso, Director Krennic and some of the distinctive Rebels from Rogue One.

Also one per box are manufactured patch cards, which make up a thirteen card set. The patches are cute and some feature really neat ideas, like the MP-5 of Krennic. Instead of the standard Imperial symbol (which is the subject of Krennic's MP-8 patch card), the patch in the MP-5 card features the Death Star with Darth Vader superimposed on it. It might look vaguely like a Dalek, but it is pretty cool. There are three different individually-numbered parallel patch cards and, mercifully, the most rare of these is x/10 (featuring a red stripe on the front). The patch cards are pretty neat, though the parallels of the patch cards do appear to be exceptionally rare (I did not pull a single one).

As is frequent in all modern movie-themed trading card sets, the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards include autograph cards. There are 74 autograph cards spread between the classic Star Wars Trilogy, the Star Wars Requel films, and the animated The Clone Wars television show and Star Wars Rebels. The autographs are the incredibly unpopular format of autograph “card” where the signer signed a pearlescent white sticker and Topps slapped that sticker on a trading card. The Mission Briefing set was sold on its inclusion of the Original Trilogy’s Big Three – Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, in addition to significant supporting actors like Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker and Billy Dee Williams. There are a number of autographs that are poised to explode in value like Jason Isaacs (now that he has been cast in the new Star Trek television show), but the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards also have a bunch of filler autographs, like David Ankrum (Wedge Antilles's redubed vocal actor), Jack Klaff, Rusty Goffe (who played a Jawa), and Megan Udall - whose only IMDB credit is The Phantom Menace, whose role she arguably got as one of Anakin Skywalker's childhood friends was because she was being dragged around the Tunisia locations because her mother was the Unit nurse there!

There are four levels of autograph parallel cards that mimic the common parallel cards, though all are individually numbered. The borders on the autograph cards are bright green. The parallel cards feature the autographed stickers slapped on cards where the bright green borders are replaced with Death Star Black (and individually numbered out of 50 on the back), Blue (25), "Gold" (I swear, they look orange!, x/10) and orange (I can only imagine how these might be differentiated from the "gold" outside the number on the back - 1/1) borders. The death star black autograph cards all look amazing.

For insane collectors who want high-level chase cards, there are two dual autograph cards (each numbered our of 3), two triple autograph cards (also numbered out of 3) and one quad-autograph booklet, of which there are only two copies. Having only seen photos of the multiple autographs, they are far more rare than they are extraordinary. The quad autograph booklet is sold on its inclusion of Mark Hamill's signature alongside three other X-Wing pilots. Topps has found the formula of including killer signatures with unremarkable signers unsuccessful with some of their other products, like the Firefly: The Verse trading cards (reviewed here!) and Alien Anthology cards and one has to figure Star Wars trading card collectors have enough to chase without something quite this insane. I would argue that the best of these high-level multiple autographs is the Carrie Fisher and Caroline Blakiston (Mon Mothma from Return Of The Jedi) dual autograph card. It is the most sensible of the multi-autographs considering Topps could not release a Carrie Fisher/Ingvild Deila (Leia's body model in Rogue One, which was kept as a pretty well-guarded secret before the release of the film) for the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card set.

The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards include sketch cards from 33 different artists. In the case I cracked, I pulled only a single sketch card and Roy Cover's sketch was one of the nicest I've seen. Ingrid Hardy did some beautiful sketches for the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards, as did Chris Meeks. I was a little surprised by how little variation there were in some of Rob Teranishi's sketch cards, but most of the sketches for the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards were a decent chase card!

For the four people who want to chase everything but the 1/1 parallel common and autograph cards, there are 263 printing plate cards (four different colors - black, cyan, yellow and magenta) that were used to produce the cards in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card sets. The printing plates were used to make the common cards, sticker cards, character foil, comic strip, Darth Vader continuity, Heroes and Villains, Rogue One Montage cards and Death Star cards. The 74 autograph cards also have printing plates included in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card set and to the credit of Topps, they slapped an autographed sticker on each one, so one gets an autographed printing plate card, which is pretty cool.

Here is where the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards left me truly divided; were it not for the insane parallel numbers and the multi-autographs, the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards actually impressed me with the bonus cards. I liked the more common chase cards, especially for a set working to transition between the existing works and Rogue One with its limited available footage at the time the set was produced.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

Outside the boxes and packs, there was a set of ten promotional cards, which were originally made available at the New York City Comic Con. The set was, mercifully, made available to fans through Topps's website and is now available surprisingly commonly in the secondary market.

Overall

So. The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards left me very divided in my opinion and I decided to make a split decision on the rating. When I consider the content of the set, I found myself liking the set a lot more than I expected - even with the weird biographies of pilots who were seen only for a few fractions of a second on-screen or some of the obscure signers. When I considered the collectibility of the set, I very much did not like the Rogue One Mission Briefing set. I found myself unable to reconcile myself to this set. So, I decided to give two ratings for the set, one for people who might like to collect, generally, one of each of the cards versus how the set would look to try to collect a master set (i.e. all of the parallels). For those who want a fun exploration of the elements that made Rogue One a viable standalone film, the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards are fun and cool. For those attempting to complete a trading card set, the Rogue One Mission Briefing are a dog to collect!

This set culls images exclusively from the Star Wars Saga, reviewed here, The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels and some early images and artwork from Rogue One (reviewed here)!

This is a set of trading cards I sell in my online store (new inventory being added daily!). Please visit and purchase from the current inventory of them at: Rogue One Mission Briefing Trading Card Inventory!

For other trading card collections based upon the films, please check out my reviews of:
2016 James Bond Classics
The Mortal Instruments Trading Cards
2014 Star Trek Movie cards

7/10 (Substance)
.5/10 (Factoring collectibility)

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L .Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |