Big Box Store Exclusives

No, not that store... the other one! 

There's no good reason that would send me anywhere close to a Walmart store. However, the giant behemoth has regularly had exclusive content in the sports cards department over the years. The other day, I caved in to FOMO or something and visited their website in order to snag a few of these Walmart-only card items.

I was never much of a fan of Bowman Platinum from year to year in the first place, but it totally faded from view when it stopped popping up at the other stores I shop at. I picked up two of the hanger packs, and they provided some decent content -- or at least some items that will end up in future trades.

Here's another one of the inserts. Devers had a huge year and is very young, much like many of the stars of the game these days.

As usual, the Bowman name means prospects-a-plenty. Montero had a rough season, so it may be awhile before we see more of his cards.

Another young star, Gleyber Torres homered last night for the Yankees in the playoffs.

I wasn't expecting a hit (this is retail, after all), so it was a nice surprise to get this sticker auto of a guy from last year's draft.

This is a purple prospect parallel. Lots of P-words!

Apparently the key four rookies in this set were inserted as short printed variations. This is one of them. I'm not really sure how short printed this is, however. They seem to be all over the place online.

I made a concerted effort to go after younger players for my fantasy teams this season. Touki wasn't exactly fantasy relevant this year, unfortunately. Check back next year?

Each box had a four card Topps Gallery "preview" pack insert into it, which was also some sort of tie-in with National Baseball Card Day? This is all very confusing. They also came with some $2 off coupons for future Topps Gallery blasters (or $5 off a "monster box".) These cards are extremely uninteresting to me, so it's doubtful that I will be headed back to the website to buy more when the Gallery set is released next month, let alone to a physical Walmart store to redeem the coupons. Any takers? It's nothing but stars in this preview set, though, making for more trade fodder.

For some reason I read this as "Asthmatic Prodigies" on first glance.

Prism... getting a little close to Panini territory there, Topps. (This is the company that also makes Prism refractors, which are definitely not the same thing as Prizm cards or Prizm parallels, because... you know... the "z".)

Finally, here's a prospect card of new Astros super slugger Yordan Alvarez.

I also picked up a Walmart-exclusive basketball hanger pack, which was considerably less successful.

In its second season (as far as I'm aware), the Panini Status set was a retail exclusive this year, and it was constructed in the worst way possible. In order to complete just the base set, you need to buy from both giant corporate overload chain stores. I had picked up some of this stuff at the red store but still have an incomplete Blazers set. I did not pull any Blazers I needed from the blue store.

Basically, the rookies in each set have two distinctly different cards with different card numbers. They generally aren't going to be considered inserts or parallels or variations because the numbering is sequentially ordered with the rest of the base set. Nice.

Here's the guy that brought the title to the second northernmost team in the league. And then he left.

This is one of the rookies, but you can only get this one at Walmart.

Here's another rookie, but this one is an insert. Actually, I think this is a parallel of an insert (note the orange background as compared to the earlier Evans card) which is just about the most obnoxious thing ever.

Enjoy the rest of your Tuesday. I am going to head to an NBA preseason game tonight for some reason. Yes, it's that time of year again already.