Every year Topps brings together hobby shop owners, dealers and other industry professionals for the Topps Industry Conference, and at this year 's event, Topps and Fanatics dropped significant news as they look to grow their business and The Hobby.

While the Mantel crew wasn't in attendance, we've been following along closely and pulled together our Top 5 announcements from the event.

#1: Redemptions have long been a dirty word in The Hobby, with collectors taking issue with the number of redemptions offered, the delays in receiving redeemed product and the length of the expiration period. Topps and Fanatics have been working to reduce the number of outstanding redemptions (stating they've gone from 70,000 outstanding redemptions to about 10,000 over the past year), and this week they announced they'll be extending the redemption window to 10 years (up from ~2 years). Topps also reiterated their commitment to reduce the number of redemptions offered, and with the access to athletes and logistics expertise available via their parent company, Fanatics, they now have the resources to slowly make redemptions a thing of the past. Rarely is an announcement universally applauded, but this one appeared to be well-received by collectors.

#2: Since Fanatics Live launched, conspiracy theories around Topps/Fanatics sending loaded cases to select breakers have run rampant. To quell any speculation that Topps was intentionally sending hot boxes to their preferred Fanatics Live partners, the company brought in professional services firm, KPMG, to conduct an audit. Per this article in The Athletic, the 3rd party review uncovered no impropriety. Will the KPMG results quiet the speculation? Unlikely! But it's encouraging to see Fanatics attack the rumors head on.

via Topps

#3: Topps will be taking over the NBA from Panini in a year, but it looks like the company couldn't wait that long to release new basketball product. Topps announced they'll be bringing back Topps Chrome Basketball, along with Midnight Cosmic, Chrome Finest, Motif and more. Given Topps has signed exclusive deals with stars like Victor Wembanyama and LeBron James, the new Topps Basketball launches will be the only place to find autographs from some of the NBA's biggest names. Due to IP restrictions, Topps won't be able to use NBA team names or marks, and we're eager to see how they work around those restrictions to deliver 'official looking' cards.

via Topps

#4: We've had plenty of discussions on Mantel about on-card relics and the underwhelming nature of many found on today's cards. That said, we're intrigued by the idea of Topps adding bat knobs to relics in their Topps Flagship MLB product. The knob relic cards will be 1/1s and will come from bats used in-game. After the success of the Topps MLB Debut Patch program, we're not surprised to see them look for additional ways to add significant game-used relics to their cards. We're eager to hear more details around this product (Will the bat only be used for one game? Will the card include details of how the player performed with the bat? How thick will the cards be!?), but in general, we applaud Topps for coming up with more ways to make collecting fun.

#5: Topps announced a host of exclusive talent deals this week with major athletes and entertainers, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Carlos Alcaraz, and a Greenday x GPK collaboration (including relics and autos!) we need to see before we comment on.

Did Topps announce anything else this week you're excited about? What do you think of the news Topps broke, and the imprint Fanatics is putting on the card industry? Let us know below!