Spicy Breakin'

An assortment of Cardinals cards from @Nachos_Grande group breaks. 

 

I've mentioned it here before and on Twitter that longtime blog Nachos Grande has a really good break group going over on Facebook. If you ask me, groups are really the only worthwhile thing on the beleaguered social media platform these days, and are honestly the only reason why I put the stupid app back on my phone.

Well, that's enough about me and my social media issues. Let's look at some cards! These are all sorts of things from Nachos Grande breaks over the past summer that I had saved up and shipped to me a few months ago.

It seems like everything is a parallel these days, but back in the early to mid-'00s it seemed like more of the parallels were numbered. This 'Xtra Points' gold parallel from 2003 Playoff Prestige is numbered to 150.

Here's one of the inserts from the most recent Panini Diamond Kings set. This goes to show you that if you just strategically chop up Stan the Man's photos you can trick yourself into thinking you haven't seen the same image on a million different cards. I think that's what Panini was going for, anyway.

When I think of Pacific Private Stock, I usually think of those weird (and slightly ugly) T206 sized minis and not the actual base cards. It turns out that I needed a number of base cards, including this Fernando Tatis card with the facsimile autograph.

Before this year's surprisingly impressive (and also expensive) Stadium Club Chrome release were the inserts you could find in the standard Stadium Club product. They all look really nice. This is actually a refractor version numbered to 99.

From the 2018 Panini Diamond Kings comes this Luke Weaver sticker auto. This is also numbered to 99. Not bad!

This might be my favorite of the bunch, however. These are game used bases (base chunks?) I wonder how many Hall of Fame votes Jim Edmonds would get this year if he hadn't fallen off the ballot immediately.

Like Luke Weaver, this one is another ex-Cardinal autograph. Optic's surge in popularity in the basketball market hasn't really translated well to the baseball market, although you wouldn't necessarily know that just by looking at box prices.

The rarest card of all of these breaks, however, is likely this Yadier Molina Downtown insert from the 2020 Diamond Kings set. Apparently these are case hits, which is why you aren't likely to see them on card show tables. The design is a lot more... New Yorker?... than a few of their NBA counterparts that I've seen.