Like many fellow collectors, my loot from the 2010 Topps Million Card Giveaway arrived recently. And let me say that the reality of actually receiving the cards didn’t exactly live up to the hype of the promotion.
For starters, I ordered 13 cards and only received 12. The one card that was missing? A 1961 Topps Phil Rizzuto High Number MVP card — probably the best card I obtained via trading through the program.
Why did this card not arrive? Because it’s backordered.
WTF?!
Backordered? I was under the impression that Topps had already bought back a crap load of cards for this promotion and that they were already sitting in some warehouse ready to me shipped whenever collectors wanted them. This surely does not support that notion.
In fact, what it appears to me is that Topps created the program and decided to buy the cards on the secondary market after the order was placed. Makes economic sense for them, but for collectors who wait a month or longer to receive their cards after they asked them to be shipped, this surely is disappointing.
The Rizzuto may have been the card I was most looking forward too, but I did order 12 others and not all was lost with them. I’m not going to showcase each one, but I’ll highlight (and lowlight) a few here.
1953 Billy Hunter rookie
Believe it or not, this was one of the first cards I redeemed. Of course it was all down hill from there. A cool addition to my rookie collection.
1956 Ray Narleski
I love this set, might be my favorite of all time.
1966 A's Rookies
No, you’re eyes are not deceiving you. That IS a 3-d Topps card. Ok, maybe not, maybe it’s just horribly out of register.
1971 Gene Tenace
Now this is freakin’ horrible. Look at this card, it looks like it survived (barely) a round of buckshot. Think the front is bad? Check out the back. I guess when they said they were giving back the cards that were thrown out, they weren’t kidding.
First off, hat tip to Greg of 
cardboardicons.com 
