Gum-Free Cards from Community Gum

Trying to get over a frustrating rain-shortened loss with... cards. 

As I've mentioned previously, I'm trying so desperately to catch up with the cache of cards I need to post about on the blog by the end of the month. I'm definitely not going to make it. In fact, I've only thrown gasoline on the fire by my call to get more trades going. What's wrong with me?

Tonight's cards were sent my way by Jon of Community Gum back in April. The bulk of these were set needs, especially from last year's Allen & Ginter offering. However, I'm just going to focus on the Cardinals here because I really want to dwell on tonight's frustrating loss or something.

Matt Carpenter might be back in the Cardinals lineup, but I'm not sure that he's Back. With some of the contributions from the call-ups and prospects this summer, I knew the point that the team started to get healthy again was going to make for some frustrating lineup decisions, but this is something that I feel like almost every team goes through at some point or another. (And yes, I might be thinly advocating for the benching of a guy in my so-called PC here, but I'm a Cardinals fan first and a whatever-you-want-to-call-me collector a distant second.)

This is a great looking photo from last year's Archives set, and it's surprising that I missed this card because I felt like I opened a lot of it. I know that a ton of the old-timey photos on modern Topps cards are colorized, but they still can look nice. Sometimes.

I like shiny cards as much as the next guy, but can anyone honestly name the year of any given Finest card based on the design, once you get past the first couple of years? I certainly cannot.

All of the cards are "the good stuff", but now we're getting to the good-er stuff. Yes! I need more cool Jack Flaherty cards like this numbered-to-100 parallel from last year's debut Big League set.

And then there's Panini Chronicles, which is just such as weird idea. I believe this is from the first year (2017) that Panini tried this out, and I'm still not sure what I think. Certainly, like every other Panini baseball set (minus perhaps some of the fuzzy mock-art Diamond Kings cards I suppose), it suffers greatly from a lack of logos. This one is a blue parallel of sorts in a set that is more parallel and inserty than anything I've ever seen, short of those Moments and Milestones sets that Topps rolled out last decade.