All That's Left is Cards

Taking a look back at a @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay on a rough night for Cardinals baseball. 

 

Between the news hitting of the passing of another Cardinals legend, Bob Gibson, and the punchless way the Cardinals season came to an official close, this hasn't been the best of evenings. Here are a few cards to more or less close out 2020 from Crackin' Wax. Besides maybe Topps Update, there isn't much left on the release schedule that interests me, and even that set figures to be even more recycled than usual with zero players making their debut in 2020 and what figures to be a lack of actual "updates".

 

As mentioned in a previous post, I haven't decided if I'm going to collect the Allen & Ginter set this year. The inserts are fine enough, I guess, but the base design really isn't doing it for me. I do have a couple of blasters on the way in transit, but with no way to actually buy this stuff on a whim in a store, the interest wanes. Gone are the days where I would knock off of work on a Friday and grab some cards at Target and show them off (with a beer) on Twitter. That was fun.

The Ginter break I bought into was a quarter of a case (i.e. three boxes), and the first box out of the (bigger) box happened to be a hot box. In the Allen & Ginter world, this means you get some shiny foil on the surface of each would be base card. It was great to knock off a bunch of parallels I probably would otherwise have a hard time finding. But again, what's with that design? They tried to give it a look where they were pasting an older Allen & Ginter card onto a frame, or something. I don't know. If you're going to give me boring minimalist photos, please give me a boring minimalist design to match it.

Here I am, knocking off my Gold Label want list one painfully slow card at a time. They still look nice and tempt me often.

The other new set on the block is Bowman Chrome, which by this point in the year just looks like more of the same. After Bowman 1st Edition, Bowman proper, and Bowman Draft, it starts to get a little repetitive. People are going crazy after Bowman Sapphire now, but it's really the same hundredish subjects and photos and design once again. We do get a different photo of the new Cardinals clean-up hitter here, so that's cool I suppose.

I also ended up with my first card of top prospect Matthew Liberatore in a (Photoshopped) Cardinals uniform. Cool.

The Stat Tracker inserts look nice. This one features another prospect I know very little about. I guess I'll have an entire offseason to study up on the prospects now.