Two Captains and Two Ravelos

A look at this year's Gypsy Queen and more from @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay 

 

Gypsy Queen has never been a set I've been terribly interested in, as I've never been into the card designs and have never felt like there was enough room in my budget for yet another retro-inspired set. Usually the set comes out close on the heels of the Heritage release, but this year's set wasn't released until the middle of the summer. The strange this is that I actually think I like this year's design. I bought into a case break from Crackin' Wax and definitely felt like I got what I was looking for, even though the case itself suffered some some quality control issues.

The base design is... well, here it is. I do think I like it better than most years, although I can say for certain why. It's possible I just got tired of looking at all of the "new" stuff Topps has been churning out and found this a bit refreshing. (How many times can you put out another version of a Bowman set? I think Topps would tell you that there's no limit!)

The inserts look nice as well. There's actually a couple of "Captains" Cardinals cards in the set (Yadi not pictured), which makes me wonder if they designed the checklist before Arenado was traded and just decided to stick with him.

Here's a nice looking on-card autograph of the Cardinals top rookie. This purple parallel is numbered to just 150. 

Like last year, the box toppers are packs of exclusive Chrome cards. These actually feature different photos from their base counterparts.

Gypsy Queen does always seem to suffer from some unnecessary parallel shenanigans. If you have trouble spotting the difference between this Johan Oviedo rookie card and its more common twin, you wouldn't be alone. The difference is that the team name is printed in script lettering rather than block lettering.

Yadi also makes an appearance on the box topper Chrome.

I also bought into a 2020 Topps Mini break. I'm sort of a sucker for these breaks, because they're not terribly expensive and have the potential to produce some cards that are pretty difficult to find. The print run for the whole set was 13,401 according to the Topps website.

I ended up with two different Rangel Ravelo cards.

So what gives here? The former Cardinal is only on the checklist once, but this set included all of the photo variations from the original sets. What I don't know is how rare these are, relative to the regular print run. In any case, it was something unexpected to find and something I probably wouldn't have sought out to purchase on its own.