Greatest Hits

 I’ve owned hundreds of albums over the course of my lifetime, in various kinds of formats: vinyl, cassettes, CDs, digital, and yes, even a couple of 8-tracks. But among all those titles, you would be hard pressed to find very many Greatest Hits packages. That’s because as an ‘album’ guy, I will likely already have the songs and find the Hits packages redundant. 

Like record companies, card manufacturers are good at creating unnecessary things to squeeze as much as possible out of the consumer. Unfortunately, I’m not as disciplined in this area of collecting as I am on the music collection. Similar-themed inserts, reprint inserts, etc are aplenty in the Hobby and often end up in my binders or boxes. 

Case in point: I recently posted about The Hammer, a 10-card insert set from 2023 Heritage. Four years earlier, Topps included a 15-card insert set called The Hammer’s Greatest Hits inside its 2019 Heritage product. 

Now, take everything I’ve said about unnecessary sets, redundancy, etc and throw it out the window. Like The Hammer, this is a must-have set and a recent eBay purchase netted me a 10-card lot. I still ended up paying close to $4 per card, after shipping, but it should make it much more attainable to finish a set.