2025-26 Topps Chrome Black Basketball: The Complete Odds, Parallel, and Print Run Breakdown

2025-26 Topps Chrome Black Basketball released August 27. Topps' checklist has been up since July 28 and the current odds sheet since September 1. The sheet runs 111 lines in two columns, one for hobby packs and one for the box topper autograph pack, with odds and no print runs. Both columns are worked out on the same count: 189,360 hobby packs, which is 94,680 boxes of two packs, about 1.23 million cards counting the autographs. From there the sheet backs up the print runs in our data on nearly every base and rookie line and puts a count on every card that carries no print run. It also turns up three things that don't fill: the numbered base tiers stop at 96 percent of their runs in hobby packs, the base Wave Refractor reads 1:12 where a /299 should read 1:7, and the biggest autograph colors have room for only a fraction of their signers.

The box

A hobby box holds two packs of six cards plus one encased autograph in a pack of its own, 13 cards in all. Topps' product page doesn't list a configuration or a case size, so the figures here stay per pack and per box.

Add up the hobby column and here's what an average box holds:

That's about two numbered base parallels a box, or one a pack. An insert of any kind turns up about once every 10 boxes. Taken at face value these lines come to 12.18 cards against the 12 in the two packs, so the 3:1 and 2:1 base lines run a little high. More on that below.

The autograph column takes one adjustment. Topps heads it "Hobby Box Topper: Autographs Pack Rate," and every box has one autograph, so its 63 lines ought to add up to one. They add up to 0.499. The numbers point to a column worked out on the same 189,360 as the hobby column, two for every box, not on 94,680 autograph packs, though Topps doesn't say so. Read that way it comes to 94,412 autographs at face value, 99.7 percent of one a box, and the sheet's rounding covers the rest. So to read an autograph line per box, halve it: 1:76 is one in 38 boxes.

By set, every version counted:

Carbon Ink is the most common autograph in the product, about two in five. About one autograph in five is a version with no color.

There's a second format. Instant Packs, a four-card pack opened online, carry the same checklist. Topps' Instant Packs odds sheet gives averages instead of lines: 2.93 base cards, 0.33 parallels, 0.36 Instant Parallels, 0.31 autographs and 0.07 case hits a pack, which add up to exactly four. It doesn't name the Instant Parallels or give their runs. They've been reported as a Teal Glitter Refractor /64 and a Black Glitter Refractor /11, but neither Topps sheet confirms that, so nothing in this piece relies on them. A share of the print run also went to the format, reported at about 10 percent, a figure Topps' sheets don't give. Neither column on the hobby sheet covers Instant Packs, so every count in this piece is hobby only unless it says otherwise.

The checklist

Topps' checklist runs 556 cards in 16 sections, 286 of them autographs.

The base set is 150 cards, split in two: 100 Base Cards, from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (#1) to Tristan da Silva (#100), and 50 Rookies, from Cooper Flagg (#101) to Kobe Sanders (#150). Each half has its own odds line for every color.

Five rookies sit in the first half: Hugo González (#41), VJ Edgecombe (#45), Tre Johnson III (#56), Carter Bryant (#69) and Jeremiah Fears (#72). They run on the veterans' odds, not the Rookies', and none of the five signs in this product.

The Rookie Design Variation is 30 cards: those five plus 25 of the Rookies, under the same card numbers.

The inserts:

• Black Lightning, 25 cards, 10 of them rookies, from Gilgeous-Alexander to Collin Murray-Boyles.
• Nocturnal, 20, five of them rookies, from LeBron James to Tre Johnson III.
• Carbon Flare, 20, 10 of them rookies, from James to Kasparas Jakučionis.
• Obscura, 15, five of them rookies, from Luka Dončić to Ace Bailey.
• Home Court, 10: James, Stephen Curry, Anthony Edwards, Nikola Jokić, Gilgeous-Alexander, Kevin Durant, Victor Wembanyama, Flagg, Dylan Harper and Bailey.

The 286 autograph cards come from 189 signers, 50 of them rookies:

• Rookie Autographs, 50: every player in the Rookies section, #101 to #150.
• Carbon Ink, 48, 45 of them players with no base card, among them Walt Frazier, Steve Francis, Mitch Richmond, Michael Finley, Antoine Walker and Goran Dragić.
• Autographs, 46, among them James, Curry, Wembanyama, Durant, Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
• Super Futures Autographs, 40 rookies.
• Ivory Autographs, 39, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O'Neal, Allen Iverson, Dirk Nowitzki, Karl Malone, John Stockton and Clyde Drexler alongside Curry, Durant and Wembanyama.
• Shrouded Signatures, 24, with Alonzo Mourning, Glen Rice, John Starks and Jason Williams among the retired names.
• Glow Up Signatures, 20 rookies.
• Black Fire Autographs, 19, among them Robert Horry, Darius Miles, Rip Hamilton and Kendrick Perkins.

Flagg and Harper are each in 10 of the 16 sections, and Bailey and Kon Knueppel are in nine. Half of the first 100 cards have no autograph anywhere in the product: 50 players, among them Dončić, Ja Morant, Devin Booker, Joel Embiid, Kawhi Leonard and Kyrie Irving. Topps' page calls Glow Up Signatures, Carbon Flare and Obscura new to the line, and in one spot Black Lightning too.

The base ladder

Odds per pack. Topps' sheet prints no serial numbers, so the print runs below are the ones in our data, and the odds check them. The top line means three and two cards a pack.

Counting every color at those runs, the hobby ladder adds up to 1,402 numbered copies of each base card, a figure that includes the /299 Wave questioned below.

Multiply a tier's print run by its odds and by its card count, and the long lines all land together. The Red comes to 197,500 on cards 1 to 100 (5 x 395 x 100) and 197,250 on the Rookies (5 x 789 x 50). The Orange, White and Rose Gold Wave land between 197,250 and 198,000 on both halves. A wrong run would stick out: a /10 Red would point to 395,000. The shorter lines, from the Refractor to the Gold, are too coarse to read that closely, but they fit once the sheet's rounding is counted. So the runs in our data hold, with one exception. That 197,000 isn't the pack count, though, and the gap is the biggest finding on the sheet. It gets its own section below.

The Jalen Brunson below is a Blue Wave Refractor numbered 011/150, which fits the /150.

The exception is the Wave Refractor on cards 1 to 100. Every other pair of colors on these two ladders has matching odds, and on the Rookies the Wave and the Refractor both read 1:14. On cards 1 to 100 the Refractor is 1:7 and the Wave is 1:12. A /299 on all 100 cards should read 1:7. At 1:12 the line has room for about 15,800 to 17,200 cards. At the 96 percent share covered below, that's 55 to 60 cards' worth of /299s, or all 100 cards at a run of about /165 to /179. Topps' note on the sheet says a subject isn't guaranteed to appear in every parallel, so some veterans may have no Wave. It could also be a shorter run, or a slip on the sheet. Until a serial number turns up, treat the /299 on that line as unsettled.

The Rookie Design Variations

The 30 variations have a shorter ladder. Odds per pack:

Per card these are seeded like the base ladder: the Red comes to 197,250 (5 x 1,315 x 30), and so does the Orange (25 x 263 x 30). The version with no color comes to about 395 to 420 copies of each card.

The inserts

Odds per pack. Each insert has a version with no color and one one-of-one:

Black Lightning, Nocturnal and Obscura are seeded alike. Topps calls Home Court a short print, and at about 48 copies of each card it has half as many as Carbon Flare, the next scarcest.

The autographs

Every line here is from the autograph column, so halve the odds for boxes. Topps' sheet calls the version with no color the Base on these three sets:

Those odds don't step down the way the base ladder does. A Rookie Autographs Red /5 is 1:764, about 15 times as hard as the 1:50 Base, but the Refractor, Blue, Green, Purple and Gold all sit between 1:58 and 1:85, whatever their runs. The Wembanyama at the top of this piece is a Rose Gold Wave Refractor numbered 01/15, which fits the /15.

The short ladders. Topps calls the version with no color a Refractor on the first four. Ivory has no such version: its /50 is the Refractor, shown here in the Gold column.

The Dylan Harper above is a Red Refractor numbered 4/5, which fits the /5.

How many packs the sheet covers

The one-of-one lines are the key. A one-of-one line counts copies directly, so its odds times the cards in its set is the pack count, if every one of them is in a pack. Four hobby lines agree to the pack:

The other four hobby lines don't match them:

Those four can't set the count. At 197,250 packs the sheet would put 10.4 Home Court Blacks in packs from a 10-card set, and 20.8 Nocturnal SuperFractors from a 20-card set. So 189,360 is the ceiling, and at 189,360 all four come out to whole cards. Allowing for rounding, the eight lines together leave room only for about 189,350 to 189,365 packs, and six of the eight divide 189,360 exactly. So the hobby column is figured on 189,360 packs: 94,680 boxes of two, and at six cards a pack plus the autograph about 1.23 million cards. That's the count Topps worked the odds out on, what its note on the sheet calls the intended configuration. The run that actually gets packed out can differ a little.

The autograph column, taken on its own, lands in the same place:

Six of the eight fit at their full signer counts. The Autographs and Carbon Ink lines fit only with one and two of their cards left out; at full counts they'd come to 193,568 and 197,616.

Read literally, at one autograph pack a box, these lines would put only half of each set's SuperFractors in packs and half an autograph in each box. At 189,360 they fill, apart from those three cards.

This sheet rounds up, not to the nearest pack. At the share in the next section, the base White is one every 197.25 packs and prints 1:198, the base Gold is one every 39.45 and prints 1:40, and the base Blue is one every 13.15 and prints 1:14. Rounded to the nearest, those would read 1:197, 1:39 and 1:13. The autograph lines mostly do the same: the Black Fire SuperFractor is one every 9,966.3 and prints 1:9,967. The Ivory SuperFractor, at one every 4,855.4, goes the other way and prints 1:4,855. So counts read off the short lines are floors: a printed 1:16 can mean anything from one every 15 packs to one every 16.

Not every numbered card is in a hobby pack

The numbered base tiers stop at 96 percent. That's what the odds work out to; Topps doesn't print a share. Take 96 percent of a tier's run across its cards, divide 189,360 by it, round up, and you get the sheet's printed odds:

That works on 31 of the 32 lines from the Refractor through the Red on the three ladders, every one but the base Wave. The short lines are too coarse to show it on their own, but the long ones leave room only for about 96 percent. It also fits the SuperFractors above: 96 of 100, 48 of 50, 24 of 25 and 29 of 30. The full run on every tier would take 197,250 packs, and 189,360 is exactly 96 percent of that. So the odds put about 4,800 of the 5,000 base Gold Refractors in hobby packs (and the same of the Gold Mini-Diamonds), 960 of the 1,000 base Whites and 480 of the 500 base Reds.

Neither sheet says where the other 4 percent went. Instant Packs look like the likeliest home, but that's our inference, not something Topps states. The gap is about 8,000 cards across the three ladders, plus eight SuperFractors. If those are the 0.33 parallels a pack on Topps' Instant Packs sheet, that's about 24,000 Instant Packs, or about 97,000 cards, around 8 percent of the 1.23 million in hobby. That's near the 10 percent reported for the format, but it isn't a match: a true 10 percent of every numbered tier would leave hobby at 90 percent, not 96. Treat the 24,000 as a rough estimate until Topps gives a count. The autographs don't show the same 4 percent gap, as the next section shows.

Four of the five insert one-of-one lines are the exception. All 65 of those SuperFractors and Blacks fall in hobby packs. Black Lightning is the fifth, at 24 of 25.

The autograph ladders fill from the bottom

Divide what the odds put in packs by a tier's run and you get how many signers' worth of that color there is:

The Gold Refractor and everything from the Orange down are close to full. Above that, and on the Gold Mini-Diamond, the Autographs and Rookie Autographs ladders thin out fast. A /299 Refractor on all 46 Autographs signers would read about 1:14, and the sheet says 1:71. Filling all three ladders at the runs in our data would take about 58,000 more autographs than the column holds, or about 51,000 if the Carbon Ink Refractor below is a /150. Instant Packs can't cover that: at 0.31 a pack it would take more than 160,000 of them, several times the estimate above.

So most signers look to skip the big colors, or those colors run lower on the autographs than on the base cards. Topps' note on the sheet allows for the first. The Mini-Diamonds run far thinner than the Refractors at the same runs on Autographs, at seven signers' worth of Purple and 12 of Gold against 26 and 43. The sheet doesn't say which signers have which colors. Until serial numbers turn up, read the /299, /150, /99 and /75 runs on Autographs and Rookie Autographs as the serial on a card, not as a count across every signer.

Carbon Ink's Refractor is the odd one. Every other tier on that ladder fills about 45 to 47 of 48 signers, and the Refractor fills 24 at /299. At /150 it would come to 47, right with the rest. So either about half the set has no Refractor, or the run is shorter than the /299 in our data. Until a serial number turns up, treat that /299 as unsettled.

The Autographs and Carbon Ink SuperFractor lines are one and two cards short of their signers, 45 of 46 and 46 of 48. Autographs' Red, White and Rose Gold Wave all come to about 45 signers too, so one signer may be missing from the lower tiers of that set.

The short ladders nearly fill. Shrouded Signatures comes to 1,199 of 1,200 Golds, 599 of 600 Oranges and all 120 Reds, and Black Fire and Ivory run about 99 percent. Two Golds come up short while their Oranges and Reds fill: Super Futures at about 1,875 of 2,000, or 94 percent, and Glow Up at about 893 of 1,000, or 18 of 20 signers' worth.

The cards with no print run

The same pack count estimates the cards with no print run: packs divided by odds, divided by the cards in the set. These are hobby counts.

The scarcest cards with no print run are Home Court and the Glow Up Signatures Refractor, about 48 of each, about as scarce as a /50. Among the autographs with no print run, Carbon Ink Base has the most copies in all, about 4,700, or one in 20 boxes. Rookie Autographs Base comes to about 3,800.

The base counts are the roughest. The two base lines print as 3:1 and 2:1, and those are too short to read closely. Every other line on the hobby column adds up to 1.09 cards a pack, which leaves about 4.91 of the six cards for base cards, roughly 930,000 in all. Split three to two, that's about 5,600 copies of each of cards 1 to 100 and about 7,500 of each Rookie. So a Flagg base card is about a third more common than an Edgecombe, since Edgecombe is one of the five rookies on the veterans' side. If the Instant Packs estimate above is close, they add roughly 8 percent more base cards on top of those counts.

The rarest pulls

The longest line on the sheet is the Home Court Black Refractor at 1:18,936 packs, about one in 9,468 boxes. There are 10, one each of James, Curry, Edwards, Jokić, Gilgeous-Alexander, Durant, Wembanyama, Flagg, Harper and Bailey, and the odds put all 10 in packs.

Next are the Obscura SuperFractor at 1:12,624 (about one in 6,312 boxes) and the Black Fire Autographs SuperFractor at 1:9,967 (about one in 4,984). After those come the Nocturnal, Carbon Flare and Glow Up Signatures SuperFractors at 1:9,468 (about one in 4,734 boxes), and the Black Lightning and Shrouded Signatures SuperFractors at 1:7,890 (about one in 3,945).

Counting every one-of-one line together, the odds put 545 in hobby packs, 11 fewer than the 556 cards on the checklist, or about one every 174 boxes. On its own line, a SuperFractor of cards 1 to 100 is about one in 986 boxes and a Rookies SuperFractor about one in 1,973.

What to watch

The things we're watching: a serial number on a base Wave Refractor from cards 1 to 100; a serial number on a Carbon Ink Refractor, to settle /299 or /150; which signers carry the Refractor through Purple colors on Autographs and Rookie Autographs; what Topps' Instant Parallels are and what runs they carry; and Topps' own count for Instant Packs and a case size for the hobby box. We'll update this piece if any of that changes.

The full checklist and the hobby parallels with their print runs and odds are on the 2025-26 Topps Chrome Black Basketball release page, and you can track what you pull in HobbyMonitor Collections.

---

This is not financial advice. These are cards. The data and analysis are here to inform. You make your own calls.

This article was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed before publishing. Always verify latest market data, stats, or news.

Published: September 2026