March Radness Update and More

A contest update and a #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax (who else?) 

 

The first week in the big NCAA men's basketball tournament is always chaotic, and this year was no exception. As much as the pandemic affected everything (because it affects everything), parity in college basketball continues to be a huge influence in recent years as the gap between the lowest rated and highest rated teams continues to narrow.

Momirka13 is the current leader, but as is usually the case, the brackets with the highest possible max scores are usually the best positioned to win the contest. Right now, bbcardz (Stadium Fantasium) and Cards from the Quarry are running neck and neck in the one and two positions for max points, with Tomahawk Chop trailing close behind. Even with all of the big upsets, the majority of the brackets still have their predicted champion in the running which is a good sign. Speaking of good signs, the Pac-12 is faring very well in the tournament so far, although it's unfortunate that one of the conference's teams will be eliminated soon with a first-ever Pac-12-on-Pac-12 crime scheduled for later this week. (Go Ducks!) I also had fun filling out a women's bracket this year for fun and am considering including it in the contest next year.

And now... on to the cards! I'm a bit late with this, but I thought I'd show off some more cards from some Crackin' Wax breaks from earlier this month.

Stadium Club Chrome continues to tempt me with its fancy cards. It feels like a lifetime ago that I found a blaster of this stuff in the wild. I had a few lucky moments like this last summer, but I'm sure my batting average on finding anything to buy at the retail level in 2020 was well below the Mendoza line.

The set was originally called Stadium Club Chrome Update (or something like that) and added an additional 100 cards to the checklist, but even in the original 300 cards they used different photos for some of the players. Can anyone identify the batter that was on deck (I think?) on this card?

The Rockies were my randomly assigned team in this break. I ended up with a refractor of a rookie catcher I'd never heard of. It's numbered to just 50 and is headed straight for my trade box.

The same break offered the online-only Allen & Ginter Chrome set. The majority of the packs led off with a hilariously mis-cut base card. I'm glad that this didn't happen to any of the Cardinals cards that I needed, but now I feel like I don't want to send this to a Rockies collector. Are there any fans of mis-cuts out there?

Ah, that's better.

This is probably the last you'll see of the Topps Holiday sets around here for awhile. I'm down to just two needs from the 2020 set and have a complete run of Cardinals base cards from 2016-2019, so I probably should avoid these breaks in the future.