2021 Topps Archives Signature Series Active Player Edition Baseball Forum

Why are these listed as separate 'sets' per player instead of just listed as one set for everyone?

Probably because there is no true "base" set to work with, but it can be categorized by player (subject matter). Sme of the Panini Chronicles soccer sets are like this where there is no base set, but the cards are grouped/categorized by release type and league.

I discussed this with Admin when the I worked on the 2016 set. At the time, there was a checklist that simply listed 1 card for each player in the release, not the actual cards that were released. At that point, I had only researched one player, but had a better idea of what was available that way, approached him, and asked how we should handle these sets. This was the method, each player gets his own insert set, and as many cards as are discovered would be added. They would be listed by actual card number, and the original release (year, brand) goes into Note2. (There was some discussion about using COMC's numbering of year, then card number [e.g., 1986-312] but we decided to stick to the TCDB policy of using only what is seen on the card itself.)

Knowing there are over 100 players in the release, and each player usually has 20-50 different cards, making the total number of different cards released each year at about 3,500-5,000, how would you go about doing this differently, while making it easy to navigate and easy to find cards? (Sincerely looking for better solutions, not being sarcastic here.)

I was just looking at the huge list of Missing Checklists on the Things To Do page and was curious.  If these are like the stamped buybacks, where we just have to add cards as we discover them, we can probably get a lot of these off the To Do list fairly quickly and get them into just regular maintenance, even if that only means a card or three per player.

Yes, I have found COMC (for sale and sold out) and ebay listings (both current and completed) have been good sources. Unfortuantely for some of these sets that have been out for a few years, we may have missed on quite a few that are no longer documented at ebay. Always best to have as many as possible to begin with.

As with so many of these sets, it just means someone has to do the grunt work.  I'll knock a bunch of these out since I'm in a lull waiting for new BBM and Epoch checklists to be released.

Worthpoint archives ebay auctions.  It's limited unless you pay for the service, but you can search their archives for cards.

Mavin.com also does this; I like Mavin better but will typically use both when researching checklists like this.