A first look at 2025-26 Topps Midnight Basketball

During the 2023-24 basketball season, Topps launched an entirely new product called Midnight, which served multiple purposes. It was one of the first ways to chase Victor Wembanyama rookie autographs, as well as all the other good rookies of the 2023-24 class. Given that there were three autos per box at an affordable price, it served the role of Wemby chasing quite well.

Despite being unlicensed at first, Topps expanded the Midnight run of products to football and UFC, but next week, we will once again see NBA players grace the Midnight design. This time though, there is a catch.

This is the first year of the basketball licensing for Topps, meaning that we will be able to see Midnight cards with their full allure, and they have pulled out all the stops in making the cards and inserts look and feel worthy of the Midnight name. Here are a few of those inserts you’ll be able to see on release day next Thursday, Jan. 29 when the product hits shelves.

Night Owls   

Night Owls are the insert I am most partial to, which is mainly because I just love owls. But putting that personal love of owls aside, this design works really well. We’ve seen the design of a leering, giant animal in the background pulled off before and the Night Owls insert perfects that concept. The line-work around the team logo and player name compliments the owl well, serving as a foreground parallel to the owl in the background. 

Featuring a 25 player checklist, Night Owls lets people collect many of their favorite veteran players, as well as chasing many of the good rookies locked in the owl’s eyes, including Cooper Flagg, VJ Edgecome, Dylan Harper, and more. One base Night Owls will be found every eight boxes, giving them just the right amount of chase in order to collect them.

Night Vision

Night Visions are going to be among the more sought after chases from Midnight, appearing just once in every 33 boxes, and that is for good reason. The Night Vision insert works in a fun element of the bottom of the card having the green hue that is evocative of when you see someone use night vision goggles in a movie or TV show. 

Purple and green are such an interesting color combination to put together, but it really works on this insert set, and the player check list of this set is worthy of the shortness of the insert. The 25-player checklist features only the game’s current greats and past greats from the last 30-40 years of hoops, highlighted by players like Cade Cunningham and Paolo Banchero, to Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and greats from every decade in between. 

Dark Matter Autos

The Dark Matter Autos insert set has a very different feel than most of the rest of the inserts and designs in Midnight, and that is because it defies what its own name represents. These are, in fact, anything but dark. 

The pink lights on these are so piercing and clean that they will stand out from anything else you’ll see in the set, and while the rest of the set does have strong color, this feels like you’re travelling through a wormhole and the bright lights of space are all around you. The angled designs of the lines around the player only add to that wormhole feel, providing a tunnel through the light. 

Dark Matter vet autos will appear in their base form once every 17 boxes, while Dark Matter rookie autos are one in every 23 boxes. If you’re slow rolling a box for yourself, it’ll be hard not to notice the bright pink light peaking out from the side of the card, giving you a bit of knowledge what the card is before you see it. 

Midnight Sun

Though my love of owls has already been established, Midnight Sun is, I think, almost objectively the coolest looking insert in this year’s iteration of Midnight. Eclipses are an inherently cool concept and the Midnight Sun takes the concept of an Eclipse and turns it into the sun and moon literally colliding together to form one entity. 

The design is also quite subtle, which differentiates it from the rest of the inserts, many of which in the set are supposed to pop out. This one is happening in the background, leaving the player as the central focus and the sun and moon as compliments. This one being subtle actually makes it stand out a bit more in a paradoxical way. 

Midnight Suns will have both a rookie and vet checklist, with each of them having different odds. Rookie midnight sun autos will appear one in every nine boxes, while vet autos will appear once every 27 boxes. 

–

So many stops were pulled out for the first officially licensed run of Midnight, even the names of the parallels are all on theme, with numbered versions of cards being called things like Summer and Winter Solstice, Equinox, Witching Hour and Black Light. 

This release only makes me more excited to see the limits to which Topps will take things with all of their licensed products, including their other popular galaxy-themed release, Cosmic Chrome basketball, whenever that releases again.