This is "so long," Heritage

 

I finally completed the 2025 Heritage set last week (the first 500 cards, no way I'm tackling high numbers sets anymore).

 

The Pete Crow-Armstrong card is finally mine. It took me a year after I landed the second-to-last card to find a PCA card price I could stomach. As I mentioned earlier, my timing wasn't good as the price of the card started soaring just when I was finishing the final few short-prints.

 

It still was too much to pay, but the prices on the card have come down about 10 dollars and I was sick of looking at his face in ebay listings for months. So I paid up. 

 

The arrival of that card closed the book on a three-year run of complete Heritage sets in the night owl nest with 2023, 2024 and 2025 Heritage finished. Each of those sets are tributes to the first three sets I ever saw, 1974, 1975 and 1976 Topps -- those sets mean the world to me, so I wanted to get those Heritage sets done more than any other.

 

I had planned to keep going, at least through 2028 Heritage (1979 Topps) and probably 2029 Heritage (1980). But I decided to stop with 2025 for reasons related to the cost of SP's mostly. But in the time since I mentioned giving up, Heritage has come up with new reasons why I'm never going back.

 

Let's list them all, just in case I ever get the urge to resume:

 

x - The higher cost of the short-prints

x - Increasing the number of short-prints to 100 a few years back

x - Decreasing the set size from 500 to 400 this year

x - Even with the decrease in set size, the number of short-prints is still 100.

x - Keeping short-prints in the set even after Heritage was no longer paying tribute to sets issued in series. 

x - Removing from the inserts the historical and pop-culture tributes to the time period

x - Scrapping the card-number-to-card-number tributes that once was a regular part of Heritage
x - Abandoning, for the most part, the photo style of the time period. This ended after the 2023 set.

x - Cramming rookies into the set when once Heritage was an oasis away from rookie overload

x - A ridiculous number of parallels, making it more difficult to complete the set.

 

That's 10 reasons, if I thought about it more I could come up with others.

 

Once, Heritage was what collectors collected instead of the flagship set to remember the way card sets were back in the '60s and '70s (heck, in the '80s, too). Now it has too many reminders of what cards are, and what the hobby is, today -- getting as much cash as you can, while you can.

 

So, that's it, for me. I'm saying so long with that one final card. From this point on, Heritage will be like every other set -- I'll find my Dodgers team set and call it a day.

 

Here are the last few short-print Dodgers from the 2026 Heritage set that also arrived the other day:

 

There were TEN short-printed Dodgers in this year's set, easily the most of any Heritage set, and, yeah, that's another reason. Though none of them came close to costing as much as the Crow-Armstrong card did, they were much more reasonable.

 

I will still buy samplings of Heritage over the next few years. Of course I want to open cards with the '78, '79 and '80 designs. You may even be able to convince me when Heritage hits the early '80s, too. We'll see how I'm feeling.

 

 

All told I completed four Heritage sets -- I got 2008 (1959) done a few years ago. That's a decent feat, each Heritage set was a challenge. It's a shame the set lost its appeal right during the mid-1970s years when cards were everything to me. And, yeah, I'm mad at Heritage for that, too.

 

But it was a good run and I feel I accomplished something. If Heritage ever wants to return to the way it was even just a couple of years ago, I might come back, but I doubt that's happening.

 

Some of this may be me growing away from modern cards even more. But in the "it's not you, it's me" department, I can safely say, it's definitely you, Heritage.