Knowing what you're getting before you buy is always nice when it comes to collecting sports cards, and Topps has made that possible with Finest Football by not making too many drastic changes from season to season. Rookie autographs and Refractors are once again the foundations for 2008, presented in the mini-box format the brand helped popularize.
Full hobby boxes of 2008 Finest Football hold three mini-boxes, which in turn hold six five-card packs. Every mini-box should contain one autograph, or three per master box.
Base Cards
If there's such a thing as a tastefully understated Finest design, the 2008 base set has it. The player photo is made to pop out against a digitally altered background, with an element that almost looks like a film strip on the right-hand side. A simple bar at the bottom holds the Finest logo and player information.
Veterans are pictured on the first 100 cards, followed by 50 2008 rookies. Topps decided to break with tradition and number the rookie cards this season, which could be good or bad depending on how you see it. Limiting the print runs may help the cards hold better values over time, but it also means you find less rookie cards per box. in fact, I found just one in a single mini-box I opened for this review.
I also pulled 21 veterans from my mini-box, meaning a full box would have given me about 60 percent of the veteran base cards.
Refractors
Topps uses Refractors as parallels across in multiple products, but they probably have their strongest presence in Finest. As usual, the veterans come in multiple colors, which can be identified by the color of the "film strip" and the info bar on each card.
Blue Refractors are unnumbered and the most common, followed by Green (numbered to 299), Black (#'d to 99), Gold (#'d to 50), Red (#'d to 25) and White-Framed X-Fractors (1-of-1). My sample mini-box produced three Blue Refractors and a Green Refractor of Redskins tight end Chris Cooley.
Rookies get X-Fractors instead of regular Refractors, available in the following varieties: Blue (#'d to 50), Green (#'d to 25), Black (#'d to 10) and Gold (1-of-1). None of these parallels made their way into my mini-box.
Insert Cards and Autographs
Insert cards aren't a big part of this set, but Finest Moments cards do help keep the theme by focusing on memorable performances. A total of 50 players are on the checklist, split between veterans, rookies and NFL legends.
Refractor versions of the Finest Moments cards can be found in the same colors as the base cards but with slightly different numbering for each level. The About.com mini-box held one regular, one Blue Refractor and one Green Refractor Finest Moments card.
Autographs are another perennial draw for Finest Football, and they combine to fall one per box for 2008. Many of the autographs are from 2008 rookies, as all 50 first-year players have signed variations of their rookie cards.
Other mini-boxes will have Finest Moments Autographs, which come in single and dual versions, or Finest Moments Cut Signatures, which go 10 deep with cut sigs from the likes of Walter Payton and Tom Landry. Last but not least is the 2008 Signature Series, an autograph program that runs through various 2008 Topps football sets.
Alas, my mini-box did not produce an actual autograph, but instead turned up a redemption card for an Adrian Arrington signed rookie variation.
The Last Word
Finest looks better than ever this season and once again provides some nice value for autograph collectors who know they can find a signature in every mini-box. Time will tell if the switch to numbered rookie cards is a popular one, though it feels like a step backwards from finding rookies in every pack to pulling just one in an entire mini-box.
Taken as a whole though, this is a good effort that falls toward the upper end of mid-range products with mini-boxes in the $40 to $50 range. Finest always has its share of fans, and they shouldn't be disappointed with this set.