Topps Gives Stickers the “Fanatics” Treatment with Serial-Numbered Parallels

The 2024-25 Topps NHL Sticker Collection was released last week. Full 50-pack boxes are available on eBay and Amazon. Unlike the print-on-demand Topps Now NHL stickers, the Topps NHL Sticker Collection stickers are available in stores and are made to be put into an album. 

What is really interesting this year is that Topps is giving its NHL album sticker set the full “Fanatics” treatment by including serial-numbered parallel stickers. 

You read that right: there are serial-numbered parallel stickers in this year’s Topps NHL Sticker album set. 

Collectors of Topps Baseball cards – which are made by Fanatics – are used to this, but for those who collect Topps Hockey album stickers, this is new. 

Since Topps got the license to make NHL stickers starting with the 2019-20 season, the Topps NHL sticker album has been a bit underwhelming. If you opened three or four boxes, the best you could hope for is that you didn’t get too many doubles so that you could complete your album.

This year’s set is very different, though. It will consist of 800 stickers, including the following subsets: 

      • 1979-80 Topps NHL Rookies
      • 2024 NHL Captains
      • The Great Outdoors
      • NHL All-Star Weekend
      • 1974-75 Topps NHL All-Stars
      • Sweater Weather
      • Rookie Showcase
      • Top Shelf Talents
      • Post to Post
      • 2019-20 NHL Stickers Throwback

It’s nice that the All-Star stickers use the 1974-75 Topps Hockey design, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Also cool is that the Rookies stickers use the 1979-80 Topps design.

But did we really need “retro” stickers that use the 2019-20 Topps NHL Stickers design? Are we nostalgic for the 2019-20 season that was interrupted and ultimately truncated by the COVID-19 pandemic? Are we fond of the ’19-20 Topps sticker design? 

Anway, the 2024-25 Topps NHL Sticker Collection will have 800 stickers: 600 base stickers, 200 insert stickers, and four photo variants found included with the sticker album. Looking at the checklist, what Topps is referring to as “inserts” are actually the foil stickers, which are seeded one per pack and are part of the main set; they are not standalone insert sets. 

As for the serial-numbered parallels, there are THREE different tiers: 

      • Blue Foil Parallels, numbered out of 100
        1-in-25 packs (hobby or retail boxes)
        1-in-26 packs (small or large gravity feed displays)
      • Red Foil Parallels, numbered out of 10
        1-in-250 packs (hobby or retail boxes)
        1-in-259 packs (small gravity feed displays)
        1-in-272 packs (large gravity feed displays)
      • Gold Foil Parallels, numbered out of 1
        1-in-2,513 packs (hobby boxes)
        1-in-2,499 packs (retail boxes)
        1-in-2,504 packs (small gravity feed displays)
        1-in-2,733 packs (large gravity feed displays)

The takeaway here is that if you open a full 50-pack box of 2024-25 stickers, you can expect to pull two Blue Foil Parallels. Red Foil Parallels will appear once in every five boxes, and Gold Foil Parallels once in about every 50 boxes. 

Gravity feed displays are those upright retail display boxes where you take a pack and another one falls into its place. Those have longer odds for pulling a parallel. 

Most collectors ignore stickers because they are not cards, so stickers almost never attain any real value – with some exceptions here and there for stickers that pre-date a star athlete’s rookie card.

Personally, I’ve been a fan of hockey sticker albums when I started collecting hockey in early 1989. My first set was the 1988-89 Panini Hockey Sticker set.

What is great about Topps new configuration for its NHL Sticker album set is that it gives us sticker collectors incentive to buy more packs, with the hopes of pulling a serial-numbered parallel of a star player instead of yet another duplicate – because trust me, you will get many duplicate stickers when trying to build this set. 

What do you think of Topps reconfiguring its NHL sticker album this year? Will you collect the 2024-25 Topps NHL Sticker set? Leave a comment – or hit me up on social media – and let me know.

Note: This article is an updated version of an editorial that originally appeared in Volume 3 – Issue 4 of the Puck Junk Newsletter. For stories like these, plus news and updates about hockey cards and collectibles, subscribe to the newsletter here.

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Author: Sal Barry

Sal Barry is the editor and webmaster of Puck Junk. He is a freelance hockey writer, college professor and terrible hockey player. Follow him on Twitter @puckjunk

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