2012 Topps Valor Football Box Break & Review

Design: 

Topps sure does get an A+ for presentation when it comes to their new Valor brand.  The packaging resembles a prop from the movie 300.  I honestly thought a Spartan might jump out and stab me with a spear.  I’m glad Topps decided to place the bottom portion of the round tin in a cardboard holder.  This helps them stand up much better and stops them from rolling around.  Its fun to have a unique box design, but you also have to make sure it can easily be displayed and stored.

Valor is a fantastic looking product.  The card stock is thick and Topps made the cards to look as if they had been drawn or painted by using certain filters on their photography software.  The overall design is quite simple and uncomplicated.  The best part of the design is the on-card autographs.  The signatures look great!  I love it when an autograph over takes a large portion of the card and isn’t confined.  The only drawback I see are on the veteran autographs which contain stickers and white boxes.

When it comes to simple design, I always think about having plain white backgrounds.  That’s about as simple as you can get.  With Valor, Topps kept the simple design but was also able to throw in a lot of color at the same time.  This especially applies to the parallels.

Price: 

Boxes are currently selling for about $180.00.  I was able to get mine for $150.00 at the show.

“Hit” Quality: 

Boxes contain six cards – (2) base and (4) autographs/relics.  Valor is mainly geared towards rookies, but it does have its share of veterans in it as well.  You almost have to for the price.  The big cards to look for are the rookie patch autographs that come (1) per case.  But there is a lot of other great stuff in here too.

I pulled the following:

Relic

• Mohamed Sanu RC Speed Field Armor 2-Color Patch #’ed/70

Autos

• Sean Lee #’ed/250
• DeVier Posey RC Honor #’ed/50
• Robert Turbin RC #’ed/170

Base

• Chris Johnson #’ed/170
• Dan Fouts #’ed/170

Overall: 

Overall, I give 2012 Topps Valor 4.5 footballs out of 5 (1=poor & 5=perfect).  This is by far one of the best looking football products that Topps has issued.  Those white boxes and sticker autographs for the veterans are the only thing holding it back from receiving a perfect score.  Its not for those collectors on a tight budget though.  Topps had been lightly promoting Valor ever since the 2012 National Sports Collectors Convention.  During the NSCC they were handing out stickers with the Valor “V” on them and a Twitter account had opened for it.  This is just my kind of product.  Very little base cards, and a handful of “hits”.