Anyone interested in high end football cards has Topps Five Star Football on the watch list.   This product is the industry’s hope to fill the void left with the lack of a NFL UD Exquisite product for 2010.  If the early card images are any indicator of the kind of high quality hits that we can expect in this product, then it probably won’t disappoint.  I have seen enough on card autographs, inscriptions, premium patches, and elegant fold out cards to make me want to pre order.

A recent addition to the product are athlete drawn sketch cards.  These cards can range from the quite cool, to the down right awful.  If the players get creative, like Ryan “Master Shake” Mathews you have a unique collectible that die hard player collectors would love to own.  If a player half-asses it like Bryan Baluga you have something that no one wants to pull, and that no one wants to buy on the secondary market.  That Baluga card is so bad that the eBay auction had the picture of the back as the primary picture.  At least the back has an autograph.

The sketch card checklist features Tony Romo, Reggie Wayne, Vincent Jackson, LaDainian Tomlinson, Maurice Jones-Drew, Roddy White, Matthew Stafford, C.J. Spiller, Matt Ryan, Mike Williams, Tim Tebow, Aaron Hernandez and others.  When the athlete doing the sketch is creative and puts some effort into it, the sketch becomes a good hit.  When the athlete half-asses it and doesn’t care, neither will the people pulling it.