A Wild Local Card Shop Has Appeared!

I bought a hobby box for the first time in forever. 

This has been casually mentioned on the blog a few times, but the Portland area has been pretty lacking in quick baseball card fixes. This, and my general thriftiness, has led me to spend most of the cash earmarked for cards at Target and other retail outlets. My favorite card shop option in the past required a trip across the river and to the suburbs (Beaverton), but that place shut down awhile back. Yesterday, on the way to a favorite brewery in Northeast Portland, I decided to finally check out a card shop that had been hiding in plain sight in a strip mall in outer Southeast... well, let's call it Gresham, because pretty much everything east of 122nd is considered Gresham to most Portland residents, whether that's fair or not.

I only allotted myself about 15-20 minutes to check out the place, as we were on a (self-imposed) schedule. Those beers aren't going to drink themselves, after all. I pawed through a quarter box for a few minutes, but I had already decided I may as well make a big splash and actually buy a box of cards for once, which I paid entirely too much money for. I understand, though, that you're not going to get online prices at a place that has to pay rent for a niche hobby. The place was crawling with Magic (?) card players (I think?) at tables, so I am hoping those guys are helping keep the lights on. They speak an entirely different language that I don't quite comprehend, although I'm sure they think the Cardinals are a bunch of dorks, too.

The box I bought was the new Topps Big League, a set I'm having a lot of fun with. I took down a bunch of my Cardinals base team set needs, although I still have a few to go.

This was actually my third /100 foil parallel pull from the new Big League set. I don't think I have a Rays trading partner at at the moment, so I should probably seek one out.

There are one-per-pack gold parallels and blaster-only blue parallels. I'm going to need a lot of each. It was nice to take this one off the list, at least.

There are fun photos in this set.

Here's Matt Carpenter's Players Weekend Nicknames insert card. Last year's Players Weekend cards were numbered like parallels, but were decidedly not parallels in design, so I'm glad they did these differently this time around. I have never gotten in the habit of calling Matt "Carp", because the only true Carp to me was Chris Carpenter.

This was a bit of a surprise. I am not sure that I've ever personally pulled a Topps redemption card. This just goes to show you how rare it is that I buy hobby stuff to open, I guess. I think I've submitted a couple of Panini redemptions, and I definitely sent in for that Shaq rookie card from Upper Deck back in the day. This could be fun (or frustrating. I'm reminded that Erin waited for like a year and a half for a Jeff Clement autograph redemption to be fulfilled, way back in 2008. Jeff Clement!)

Weird Trout flex.

As I mentioned, there were quarter boxes. I am definitely going to have to go back sometime this summer. I only made it through one row of one box, but I was able to knock out my team set from 2017 Panini Diamond Kings.

There are two versions of both the Alex Reyes card and the Stan Musial card from this set. I needed one of each, and now I don't.

I bought this because (spoiler alert) I've been semi-secretly squirreling away George Springer cards for a few years now. Hmm.

Michael Wacha just got removed from the rotation, but I still was interested in snagging this Team USA card from his first year appearing on cards.