CARDBOARDFILE
baseball / Topps Chrome Allegiance
20 cards
Allegiance is a twenty-card insert from 2000 Topps Chrome, numbered TA1 to TA20, and it exists in two versions. The base card was inserted into Series One hobby packs. The refractor was too, and it is serial-numbered to one hundred copies.
That number is the reason this set is worth a page. Almost everything else on this site is a card whose print run nobody recorded, where a population report tells you how many people paid to have one graded and nothing at all about how many exist. Here the denominator is printed on the card.
So the refractors can be read the way population reports are usually assumed to work and almost never can. PSA has recorded 142 refractors across the nineteen numbers it has seen. If a hundred of each were made, that is 1,900 cards, and about seven and a half per cent of them have been graded. The rest are in binders, in boxes, or gone.
The spread across players is what you would expect and it is worth seeing anyway. Ken Griffey Jr. at TA20 has 22 of his hundred graded. Derek Jeter at TA1 has 18. Jim Thome and Mark Grace have one each. Nobody has ever submitted an Eric Karros refractor at TA12, so all one hundred of his are ungraded.
The base cards are a different proposition. Topps did not publish a print run for them, so the population figures on this page carry the same caveat as everywhere else on the site - they count submissions, not survivors. PSA has recorded 251 base cards across the seventeen numbers it has seen, and 143 of those are PSA 10.
That gem rate is the other thing worth noticing. Fifty-seven per cent of the base cards submitted come back a 10. On the 1948 Leaf cards elsewhere on this site the figure is zero, and on 1986 Fleer it runs between one and three per cent. Chrome cards from 2000 were machine-cut on stiff stock and went straight from a pack into a sleeve, and it shows.
A word on what is not here. Cards TA2, TA12 and TA16 have no base cards recorded by PSA, and TA12 has no refractors either. That does not mean those cards do not exist. It means nobody has paid to have one graded, which on a twenty-five-year-old insert of Ivan Rodriguez, Eric Karros and Andruw Jones is not surprising.
This is an inexpensive set to own and an awkward one to complete in high grade, for opposite reasons on the two versions.
Base cards are cheap and grade well. More than half of everything submitted comes back a PSA 10, so paying a large premium for one is paying for a card that is not scarce. If you want the set, buy raw and buy nice - the odds of a clean copy grading are better here than almost anything else on this site.
Refractors are the real chase. A hundred of each were printed and single figures of most have been graded. They command a substantial premium over the base cards and always have.
The scarce ones are not the famous ones. Griffey and Jeter have been graded most often because people submit them; Thome, Grace and Larkin have barely been touched. A low population on this set reflects who bothered, not what survived, which is the reverse of how it reads at first glance.
Watch what you are being offered. Base and refractor look similar in a listing photograph, and the refractor carries the serial number on the back. If a seller does not show the back of a card described as a refractor, ask.
And check the insert name. 2000 Topps Chrome carried several insert sets and the numbering prefixes differ - Allegiance is TA, and there are others. A listing that says only 2000 Topps Chrome and a player name is not telling you which card it is.