2009 Topps Magic Football

All right, I'm finally ready to post that pack of Magic two weeks after I first bought the thing. Was it worth the wait?

First though, I have the winner of the poll and the

OFFICIAL SONG OF 2009 TOPPS MAGIC FEETSBALL:

Magic Carpet Ride with bonus Magic Eye pictures. Huzzah!

Ok, enough of that, now to the cards. So here's an original 1951 Magic Football card of Wildcat Arnold Burwitz.

Why he's wearing pink pants I do not know. Paul Posluzny does not appear to be wearing pink anything.


Oh yeah, before we go any further, here's one cards special for Gellman:

Yes, those are trees behind Vinnie Drake. TREEEES. There's a duck back there too somewhere. You can kind of see the perforations on the bottom of the card, these were sold in strips of two much like the 1951 Baseball Red back and Blue back cards. Speaking of backs:

Steve Slaton got back. No stats on the back but there is the normal height/weight/age stuff, a short bio, a college seal and a trivia question on there. Also for some unknown reason a stylized map of West Virginia.

Here's the back of a Wolverine. The two backs are very similar except the oldie ones used a nice black and white picture of the college campus instead of a goofy looking map. The trivia questions are handled slightly differently also. the old ones had a silver scratch off material like a lottery ticket covering the picture that you would scratch off with a coin. The new ones also have a coin scratch gimmick, but with some invisible ink that shows up when scratched supposedly. I haven't scratched any of my cards, should I? If so, which one?

Here's a Hokie card. As you can see this set is very college oriented. Almost like a Press Pass set from the '50s. Well, Topps Magic kind of was the Press Pass set from the '50s, except that college ball was much more popular than the pros. The Magic Design turned out to not be the only one Topps recycled for this set:

This Donald Brown II card (who are these people??) is based on the 1955 Topps All-American design. This is one of my favorite football sets of all time so I'm happy to see this pop out of a pack. I'm not sure if it's a parallel or insert set though. Ok, now for the good stuff:

Here's a vintage Bill Wade card compared to a '09 mini card of Donnie Avery. The size is just about right, there's obviously no perforation on the new one. The font is slightly off (I'm a stickler for fonts) but overall it's a good job by Topps on retroizing this set.

Here is the exact moment I realized "oh mah gawd, this isn't a rookie college set". Basically, I haven't followed the draft class all that closely and since none of the guys in the pack so far were anyone who ever showed up on one of my fantasy teams, I assumed they were all rookies in their college unis. NOPE. Pennington ain't no rookie. Now I'm wondering if they had the playters all dress up in their college digs or if the photochoppers were working overtime.

Chase Coffman. No clue who this guy is. Am I really this far out of touch with football??

Last card in the pack, Kellen Clemens of the Ducks. I know there's a collector out there who likes Oregon, I just can't remember who they are. the truly odd thing about this set is there is no mention of the NFL team the player is associated with on the card at all. Great for college fans, but I'm sure any die hard NFL fanatic would go insane if they ripped a box of this stuff. It would make a good trivia game for halftime though,

There are also legends and rookies in this set somewhere and I'm assuming like every other retro product under the sun there's also SPs. I'm too busy trying to figure out my Gint-a-Cuffs scoring to wrap my head around that right now. Maybe once I break down and pick up a blaster.