Cards for Christmas Eve (A Tale of Two Breaks)

 

It's Holiday Time and time for another #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax -- throw another log on the fire.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope everyone is hanging in there currently. I had some free time tonight and thought I'd show off a few cards from my most recent mailday from Crackin' Wax. This time there were two new products on offer, one that's never been a favorite of mine but other seem to like, and another one that's a bit of a debut.

Bowman Draft is the one I'm never all that enthusiastic about. It's usually the third time we've seen the exact same design, and this year it's really the fifth if you could both of the "1st Edition" releases. We've also seen a bunch of Nolan Gorman cards in past Bowman sets. In any case, it all seems rather unnecessary.

The people are here for the "1st Bowman" cards, though. (Not to be confused with 1st Edition Bowman.) I did end up knocking out both the "paper" team set and the Chrome team set, which is nice because I've never purchased a pack of Bowman Draft in my life, nor am I planning to.

You could also call this set Bowman Photoshop and you wouldn't be wrong even in years where there was a lot of professional baseball happening. I guess I prefer Photoshopped MLB uniforms over college and high school ones (wait... do I?) I think the sweet spot would be college/high school/minor league with big league logos, but there probably aren't a lot of people out there that would agree with me.

This one is a refractor. It shines.

Speaking of shining, the inaugural Allen & Ginter Chrome set is here, and it looks... really nice somehow. Topps was able to turn my all-time least favorite A&G design into something good here.

I like the way that the border goes from silver metal to light, and I also like the gold accents on the logo.

There are minis, too. They only come in the basic version and super rare parallels. There are no card back variations, in other words.

I do like what they did with the background, as well. If it wasn't for the cost being a bit out of my price range, this would probably be one of my favorite releases of the year.

My lone numbered card of the breaks is this Tommy Edman green parallel. There are 99 copies of this out there... well, 98 now.