The Skuttlebutt Podcast

Our TMC 2nd Anniversary Celebration continued this past weekend on Twitch with an interview with Kevin-John, Disney Master Artist and now a very frequent Topps Digital Artist! We were first introduced to Kevin-John's work in Topps Marvel Collect at the end of February during the Topps WinterCon when his incredibly Sketch set came out, including then-rare limited versions of the 3 sketches that were capped at 500cc. He's also done plenty of work for Topps, starting with Star Wars at DigiCon last year, and all of the apps during WinterCon. We discuss working with Topps, working with Disney, and working with Marvel, as well getting a peek at some sketches that didn't make the cut from an approval standpoint for that WinterCon release! That you will have to check the recording on YouTube to see (https://youtu.be/mYEsJOFhB3w)! We also discuss what's next for Kevin-John on the Topps front!

Thanks again to Kevin-John for joining us!

You can find out more about Kevin-John on his site here: https://www.kevin-john.com/

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

Our TMC 2nd Anniversary Celebration kicked off this past weekend on Twitch with an interview with Andy, formerly Product Manager of Topps Marvel Collect. During this interview we discuss a large variety of topics, including how Comic Book Day / Topps Now came to be, the reasons why we don't see certain characters, the craziness of Printing drops and the new Dawn of X Printing release. We also discuss the early days of the app and Andy describes to us how the team reacted to all of the ups and downs of the beginning of the app.

Thanks again to Andy for joining and enlightening us!

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

So today is Topps' big day. After a year of playing around with Garbage Pail Kids and Godzilla, Major League Baseball finally agreed to release their physical set as NFTs. We doubt Topps' GPK track record convinced them. We think it was more of them seeing the NBA rolling in money with Top Shot that did the trick. Regardless of how they got there, today the first MLB NFTs come out on the Wax Blockchain. And based on how the Promo Pack releases have been going, it's going to be a disaster. So we'll see how that goes!

But the big fear on everyone's mind is that Topps will completely shift focus away from the established apps to primarily sell NFTs once they get the rights to do so. And we're here to say: don't worry. The apps allow for almost daily releases and gamification that has made Topps a lot of money over the last half a decade, and a significant amount last year during the pandemic, and we doubt they are slowing down. And this is crazy to say, but it is true: the app servers handle heavy traffic better than Topps' NFT servers. Some blame Topps, some blame the blockchain. But none of their releases on the blockchain have gone smoothly, and it will take years for them to perfect them at this point.

Anyway, we also go over some of the releases from the past few days including the Wandavision collection which would have fared much better as individual releases. And we also talk about the second to last Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode from last week at the end.

The big anniversary stream is coming up this Saturday, and if you have any questions for Andy (former Topps Product Manager for Marvel Collect) or Kevin-John (Disney Master Artist) please email us or contact us in some way!

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

Since our last episode, we had a few very interesting releases: some good, some bad. Let's start with the Topps Now release, which we all still call Comic Book Day, and how at first it looked like they changed the mechanics to make Gold covers pay only. Guess what? It was planned! What, you didn't know? Topps said they held the coin pack with gold odds back a day because there was an issue with one of the gold covers. This was not told to anyone, and the diamond packs remained, but we should have known! Duh! Most veteran traders waited until the next day, but it still led to the one broken cover having a significantly lower CC than the others.

The good was the return of First Prints! And Second, and Third, and Final! All in the same collection! While this is a very different strategy than old printing releases, it actually makes it nicer for people who are collecting the First and Second prints to finish the Third and Final without having to open packs in the future. But it also lessens the chance of having a lower CC award for the lower printings as more people will have them.

We also announce our plans for the day of the anniversary, which should be on Twitch on April 24th at 2pm EST!

Besides that, we have winners for our Meme contest! Winners will pick their prize in order that they've won:

1st - Aja Olander with the "Are these different pictures?" meme with the Baron Zemo set

2nd - Regan Murphy with the "When you spend 250k coins and get no super rare" meme with Iceman holding his chest

3rd - Brody Keeton with the "me" holding hands with "I'm only going to collect sets I'm interested in from now on!" and then peeking at "Random new set I have no interest in!"

Check Facebook or Twitter to see the actual meme images! We will be contacting the winners one by one to pick your prizes!

Finally, we discuss the latest, intense episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier (well, now second to latest!) at the end.

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

Do you like collections? You bet you do! Every 3 days, a collection. Epics? Pssh, you don't always need epics. What do you mean the packs cost the same as the ones with epics in them? Look at this Impact Collection! It has everything you want, right? We even threw another wave of Splash! into it for some reason! Check out these cool Retro cards! Please ignore the text bubbles over the characters though. 90s man, you love the 90s right? The zebra and sprinkle borders, what's not to love? Who cares that these covers aren't from the 90s, they have cool 90s borders!

Yeah, collection craze has happened in the last week in the app and they're... okay. We're more interested in the change in gold CBDs though. No more free lunch there! You want gold, you pay. And people certainly are! The CC on this week's gold CBD are already nearing 350 and there's 2 days left. This only tells Topps to keep going in this direction. We discuss our thoughts on this decision, along with the new Guardians of the Galaxy event, and more on this week's episode!

Oh, and we talk about the latest Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode at the end.

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

We're officially a week through our Anniversary Season event! We've had great giveaways, great challenges, and donations across the community to use for giveaways. So far, the community-driven celebration has been a success and there's much more to come! App-wise, we're getting some fun easy Falcon and the Winter Soldier sets which is a nice difference from Wandavision's releases but the last pay-only FATWS character art, which should be John Walker, is nowhere to be found. We also got a new OA Artist, Billy Martin, with a very unique art style in their Rogue artwork. And then Editor's Choice came to an end which, while free, is the longest set we've seen in a long time at 21 weeks. We see a lot of people trying to play catch-up simply because they didn't start playing until halfway through the set. Just like the good ol' days. Speaking of the good ol' days, the fan-favorite (sarcasm) Essentials set is back with a bunch of essential characters! I miss Wield the Shield already.

Besides app talk, we discuss this week's Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode, which is chock full of references to events that occurred in movies from 5+ years ago. And Jim needs a lot of explanation as he either forgot or didn't see a ton of those movies! So there's a lot of retrospective discussion to try to figure out where the story will go in the show. But we can all agree that John Walker is still hated by fans far and wide!

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

This week on Wednesday marks the beginning of what we at the Skuttlebutt Podcast are calling "The Anniversary Season" in Topps Marvel Collect. Last year Topps disappointed us by having absolutely no anniversary-driven content within the app, and nothing more than a tweet to say "we're 1 year old today". Well we're not going to let that happen again this year and we're starting our own celebration across the community! There will be contests and giveaways all month long. If you aren't a member of the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2201948839891287 or Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ToppsMarvelCollect/ we'd suggest you join one as we will be posting daily giveaways all month long. Of course, we will be tweeting them as well @SkuttlebuttPC on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SkuttlebuttPC

Besides the anniversary stuff, we reminisce (again) on speed awards and the idea of altering the Global Count of cards to reflect the actual number of copies that are still available. And then we discuss the first Falcon and the Winter soldier episode along with the cards we've seen so far for the show.

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

Happy New Year! 2021 base is here! What's that you say? It's March? Oh, well, close enough, right? While many will complain about reused art, the design really isn't too bad and there is some nice artwork regardless! For some reason the new Motion flag is on every new base card but no matter how long you stare at it, nothing actually moves. Besides that and the very soft launch of the base cards itself through the Mystery Boxes, the Wheel, and Events before actual packs, it's finally here. And they have a list of all of the variants coming soon. Here's hoping a few of them have a low limit!

Besides that we talk about the new flags on the motion, tilt, and video cards and the real estate involved in those. We also discuss some ideas for the 2nd anniversary of the app coming up, and what Topps could do to make the anniversary special. All that and more on this week's episode!

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

The title of this episode represents the assortment of topics we discuss and having no real connection between all of them (besides the app of course!). Vintage came out with no limit to kill another classic set, Timeless Series 2 came out exactly as Series 1 did, and Comic Book Day releases were indeed ruined on purpose (and 2 more covers were added this week, lol!). We also talk about the stagnant sales on the secondary market for older, once popular cards, and wonder what the diamond VIP traders spend $1000 on in the app every month.

The second half is all about the end of Wandavision, so naturally there are spoilers.

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!

While Marvel's presence on the Digicast was less than ideal, their content in the app during Wintercon was pretty good. Not only did we get original art from Kevin-John, a Disney Master Artist, with a 500CC limited variant, but we also got a Laufman Original Art Venomized set with fairly involved mechanics. All of that was in addition to the Cardio collection which seems to have mostly unused artwork on the cards and the free coins and Omnibus diamond packs every day led to a pretty fun and packed weekend.

The week after started okay, then the VIP card was Falcon, which is alright and makes sense for the show coming up, but was still a little disappointing for those who spend as much as they do in the apps. Then new Inked, which was immediately reused art from one of the Modern Vintage sets. Then Topps Now came on Wednesday and they managed to destroy the one recurring set that everyone loved by making both variants the exact same covers, AND 12 covers in a single week. It really does amaze us how they take a set that all traders are completely happy with and manage to ruin it. Traders are hoping that it's some sort of mistake, which is just the denial phase of grief. When the same thing happens again next week, the pain and guilt will begin. It's a shame that the hopes found during Wintercon almost immediately got destroyed less than a week later.

We also spend a few minutes talking about the ending of the latest episode of Wandavision in prep for the finale this week!

As always, if you have anything you want to share with us or be read on the podcast, email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @SkuttlePC!