Sports cards

Atomic Refractor

Also written: Atomic Refractors · Atomic

A refractor etched with a bold field of irregular curved shapes — a much chunkier pattern than the plain finish.

PatternThe reflective layer is textured or shaped

An Atomic Refractor is a refractor whose refractive layer is etched into a bold field of irregular, curved shapes covering the whole card. It is the loudest of the common Topps pattern finishes: where a plain refractor sweeps and an X-Fractor forms a neat grid, an Atomic breaks the light into large organic segments that are obvious the moment the card moves.

How to spot it

• Size of the shapes. Atomic segments are big enough to see across a table. If you need to lean in to resolve the pattern, it is probably a different finish.
• Irregularity. The shapes are curved and uneven rather than a repeating grid.
• Whole-card coverage. Like every pattern refractor, it runs over the photograph as well as the borders, because it lives in the finish rather than the artwork.

Atomic Refractors turn up in Topps chrome-based products, sometimes plain and sometimes with a colour stacked on top. As always, the pattern places the card above the plain refractor of the same colour in that product's ordering; the exact rung and the run are things you read off the card and that year's checklist, not off a guide written in a different season.

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